This critical examination, based on in-depth interviews with current and former students from sport management academic programs in the United States, provides insight into how the academic internship is being reconfigured at the nexus of higher education and the sport industry. Drawing on the concept of hope labour, the analysis illustrates that sport management student internships in the sport industry are increasingly experienced and rationalised as future-oriented 'investments' and 'opportunities'. It sheds light on coercive market forces behind increased internship participation and illustrates how the sport industry often fails to provide proper learning contexts for students to develop skills and advance their careers. We argue that sport management internships experienced, rationalised, and institutionalised as a form of hope labour obscures and contributes to the reproduction of exploitative realities and substandard experiential learning practices within the sport industry.