There are some great sports documentaries. One, in particular, Trophy Kids, is a great example of where parents can maybe go a little bit too far in living vicariously through their children. We see it a lot in youth sports management.

Parents are spending thousands of dollars on getting their child to earn a sports scholarship. Where their kid is going to be the next big thing, and they deserve more playing time, or they deserve to do this over others. It all gets a little frenzied and crazy.

We know there’s only a small percentage of those children participating that are going to get that scholarship. So, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get their kid to that next level. And then, only a select few actually make it.

The Scholarship Myth in Global Sports

There is another myth: that if I spend all this time and money taking my kid across the country, doing a lot of select programming, getting them early specialized, then they’re going to get that scholarship.

The reality is that it seldom happens. Only a small number of people are given scholarships at that level—and an even smaller number when you go to the next level, to the professional ranks. There’s a lot of early pressure.

That’s a lot of stress for a child to endure. Especially if we’re talking about little 8-year-olds or 7-year-olds playing when they don’t even really understand the game. Ask children what they want out of sports, they will tell you they want to have fun.

That’s their first answer. I want to have fun. I like playing sports because it’s fun. It’s not, I want to win. Maybe they have role models that they want to be like.

Sports Management Education Can Learn From Listening to Kids

More often than not, kids will tell you they want to have fun. Once they’re influenced by adults, that starts to shift and change. It puts a lot of pressure on a young child to do many hours of practice and not really get a choice.

Parents put children into sports for structure and to teach them all these wonderful values we talked about. But at the end of the day, it’s not really their choice.

Lessons to Learn for Students in Online Sports Management Education

It’s an expectation that parents and coaches should take a hard look at. They should listen to see if the child really wants to do that and if it’s something they want to pursue at this level. Often, I think kids are pushed into it without being asked if they want to pursue the next level.

The homo ludens idea tells us that since life is complicated and overwhelming, playtime is an essential part of our culture. Since the beginning of humankind, we have all faced the hard reality of earning a living, of trying to fall in love, of trying to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. It’s all we think about. The pain is real. The pressure is real.

When we watch sports, someone else acts out those challenges. Global sports culture allow us to indulge in these challenges and take risks that we might not take in real life because the consequences of loss would be too great. That’s an important point to keep in mind as you approach sports management. When we play sports or watch them, we experience the vicarious pleasure of being alive within the full range of feeling, including risk, triumph, and loss.

Online sports management education helps us to understand how people get to experience all that without the consequences of death, of pain, of bankruptcy, of all kinds of very real life challenges. There are very few arenas and very few places in life where we get to explore those feelings.

You might be able do it in acting or in practicing your faith. But sports, especially, engage you physically and emotionally. As you continue your sports management education, it will help to think of sports in terms of escape from the challenges of daily life in a very real way, a way of consequence.

One thing you might learn about in sports management education, is that playing sports can frequently be one of the best ways to boost your confidence and develop a sense of self-worth that can last you for a lifetime. However, for this to happen, it requires both a strong support system and a safe space to fail.

You need someone who’s going to be constructively critical of the mistakes you make, and also make it clear that you’re going to improve. Without having that, sports can become a venue for developing a significant fear of failure, especially if someone’s in your ear beating you down every time you do something wrong.

Really, it falls back on parents and coaches and the programming they use to build a culture around children that enables them to feel good and strong, even when they lose or perform poorly. This kind of thing has the potential to build that confidence and self-esteem, and we can see it when it happens.

We see it come through in education. We see it come through later on in life and career. When treated the right way, sports can absolutely instill these wonderful values, self-worth and confidence. But it has to be directed, at least to a degree, because otherwise it could have a negative effect instead. Having people around you who are positive, encouraging and supportive can really make all the difference in the world.

If you’d like to learn more about the role of sports in personal development, as well as many other useful lessons concerning sports management and global sports, consider giving online sports management education a shot.

In areas where there is a high rate of poverty, nonprofits will go in and find ways to bring equipment, coaches, and support systems to places that may never have been offered those opportunities. Sports offers an opportunity to escape to some degree.

They also try to find ways to educate the people in these areas. Education can help move someone out of that poverty or give them an opportunity that they never thought possible, simply because they’re now interacting with different groups of people.

That’s a lot of what these nonprofits do — use global sports to promote change. They provide sports as the hook, and then educate based on whatever needs arise. This means that people in these areas could potentially see new opportunities outside of what they’ve known or considered.

How do we get people to come in and participate so that we can then help to educate them? Street soccer is one example of a hook. It gives people an opportunity to come in and play a sport, but then it also gives them opportunities for mental health counseling, education, housing, and getting back into society.

Street soccer offers great opportunities to pull those people in with something that might be of interest to them, and then helping them with life skills, in some cases, for their mental needs, physical needs, or just general support.

Sports management education or online sports management education can be so much more than just sports management. Sports really are a way to bring people together, and from there, a multitude of possibilities open up.

In the summer of 2016, Helen Maroulis was the first female wrestler ever to win an Olympic gold medal for the United States. When she sat down and started to tell us her story, she didn’t talk about picturing things or conquering mountains. Her story was about something simple. She explained to us that a person goes into battle or a meeting with nothing other than what they have with them. She was able to say, “Look! This is what I did. This is how I was able to win a gold medal. I go into a situation and put forth the best effort that I can. I don’t think that I’m always going to win. I simply know that I’m prepared mentally and physically to do the best that I can.”

Impact of a Well-Told Story

Helen was able to tell her moving story in 30 to 40 seconds. It reached millions because a lot of people could relate to it and decided to share it. The most important thing that she could do was take a large story like winning the gold medal in Rio and narrow it down using the simplest of tactics. This is what you need to do when you’re trying to tell a story.

Important Storytelling Lessons

Everyone has a story. Whether they’re a brand, league, team, student or parent, they have a story. The most important thing that you can do is make certain that you understand the messages that people are trying to communicate to you and others. You must also use the proper medium, no matter what that is, to make certain that whoever you represent is telling their story properly in an impactful way.

One important rule is that you must actively listen when someone is trying to tell you their story. You have two ears and one mouth. So if you listen to whoever it is that’s trying to tell the story and you’re able to prepare from that interaction, you can tell amazing stories on whatever medium that you want to tell them. Today, you have so many options. You can tell their story using video, print, digital or audio. It doesn’t really matter which medium you use, but you have to make sure that you match that medium to the person who’s telling the story.

You also need to be consistent. You must make certain that you’re telling a story to the right audience, and it’s the right story that you want to tell. There are plenty of examples of people who put stories on Twitter and other social media platforms and made one or more mistakes that caused them to lose control of their message. No matter what it is that you want to do with a story, controlling the message is important.

As long as you’re consistent, anyone in your global sports organization should be able to repeat your story. You can do whatever you like as long as your story is consistent and you’re telling it to the proper audience. With social media, you can tell your story with any device that you want to use in any way that you want to use it. Whether you’re using a phone or laptop, you can build your own story and use Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat or any other platform to spread it.

Yet, the most important thing is that you need to curate the message and make certain it’s told consistently and properly. You also need to make certain that you’re conveying the right message.

Finding Storytelling Opportunities

Opportunities in storytelling exist at every level of sports management. You can find them at agencies and in teams. Athletes and celebrities are hiring their own people to help them tell their stories.

There are some really important characteristics that you can develop through a sports management education that you need to have to help them tell their stories. You have to be a good listener and able to write well. It’s also great if you can speak to the world in more than one language. You need to be able to not only tell the thoughts that you want to express, but you also need to take other people’s thoughts and put them into a form, such as video, audio or print, and make sure that the story is told consistently.

There are so many sports management jobs out there now, from entry level to senior positions, that are growing by leaps and bounds. Teams are hiring for sports management jobs, but they’re mostly hiring at entry-level positions. Given that people have up between five and seven years of experience, they’re primarily hiring senior people for story curation, digital and social media, brand building and advertising positions that didn’t exist before.

Online Sports Management Education

These positions will continue to grow. As long as you have the traits outlined, such as being a good listener and writer and a really good storyteller, you can find these jobs. You only need to remember the most important things. You need to know how to tell your story. You need to know all the tools that are out there to tell your story or the story of the company that you work for in the sports industry. An online sports management education is one of the best ways to gain access to this knowledge and these tools.

One crucial aspect to understand in global sports and sports management is sponsorship. Anyone interested in sports management education or online sports management education needs to understand the value of sponsorship.

A sponsorship is an agreement between a corporate organization and a given sports organization. Any given sponsorship opportunity offers an exclusive partnership deal between a sports organization or, in some instances, the sports venue and the organization. For example, when Madison Square Garden makes a sponsorship deal with Pepsi, Pepsi gets a number of things in return. For starters, Pepsi gives Madison Square Garden a financial investment.

This gives Madison Square Garden an extra source of revenue. Pepsi also gets a number of different opportunities. One example would be a product trial, so consumers now have an opportunity to only try Pepsi at Madison Square Garden.

Now, while Pepsi might be an example of something that’s widespread and everyone’s possibly had, there could be a certain pizza company that few have ever had. If that pizza company makes a sponsorship deal with Madison Square Garden, every single individual who’s now visiting Madison Square Garden has a new opportunity to try out this pizza company.

The sponsorship opportunity also offers viewership ability. Pepsi or the pizza company might have ads up all over the stadium, which will be seen by thousands of people who are coming to Madison Square Garden. This is a great benefit in addition to the product trial. Not only are visitors getting a chance to see the signs, but they’re getting a chance to perhaps consume Pepsi or consume any given new pizza company that has signed a deal with Madison Square Garden.

Something that might not be stressed enough in online sports management education is the difference between professional and collegiate sports.

Colleges have a very different business model than professional or global sports with different sports management goals. They’re trying to connect with their students, their alumni, their boosters, and the community in a way that professional teams might not necessarily be looking toward.

It’s important to remember that collegiate athletics is about building a brand and brand identity. Sports management education stresses that professional teams have to build a brand, too. Pro sports, however, build brands and brand identities in a different way.

The collegiate revenue model is about tickets and people watching, and it’s about the regional networks, or the Big 10 network, or the Pac-12 network. Those are important, but they also have to connect the athletics to the university and to their conference in a way that gets people interested in supporting the school.

I think colleges use athletics as a way to really connect with big donors and to get people connected to the university in a way that makes them feel like they’re a part of it.

CRM is a way that a lot of consumers are now understanding it almost as second nature. If I write an email to someone saying that we want to go on a vacation, I might see a pop-up ad for a cruise line. Now, that doesn’t mean that’s too invasive. It just simply means the CRM understands, in real-time, my wants and needs, and offers a solution to satiate my needs. CRM has the ability to really offer what the consumer wants and we’re seeing that a lot of consumers are clicking on the cruise ad, for instance. If they are searching for certain shoes, for example, perhaps athletic or sportswear, CRM may take that sports data into consideration, such as the type of information regarding who they are and their age group. They’ll track and triangulate the data in terms of what are this age group’s preferences, along with the search patterns before, and offer up new athletic wear for these consumers. Again, this is information that is directly catering towards the needs of what the consumer wants. It’s offering a solution in terms of what the consumer can get from it.

Organizations now are able to collect so much more data about their fans and about who these people are that are following them or who are purchasing from them. Sports management education teaches, one of the ways that information can be used is through really targeted marketing and targeted emails. An example of this might be a team who can look at a fan and say, “This person attended 10 of our 82 games last year.” It doesn’t make sense to market a season ticket plan to this person. Now, teams have data where they can look and see they have attended 10 games. They purchased two tickets to each of those and they tended to sit kind of up in a higher section where the tickets are a lower price. That allows the team and sports management to then develop a really targeted, maybe mini package or 10 game plan. Maybe they’d bump it up to a 12-game plan to try to increase the amount that person spends engaged with the team in the following season. They can do some really targeted promotions using that data, according to online sports management education.

One thing that can be said about the relationship between media and sports is that they really work well together, even at the toughest times. Media feeds both sports and sport businesses. As the world has changed and technology has advanced and evolved, people seem to want more detailed information about a lot of the same things.

For example, when we follow a particular team or club, everybody wants to know all of the general information, but they want to know more than that as well. Obviously, they want to know the scores and how the players are doing, but they also want to know the inside information of what’s happening in the locker room, in the training room, and how the players are feeling. There is so much demand out there for all of this information. Given the state of the media landscape, especially online, it’s clear that content is king and distribution is maybe even more important.

One thing we’re able to do now is to look at how people are able to locate the specific info that they want about a particular player, team, or game, and also figure out what it means to them, when and how they want to receive it, etc.

Media provides a level of stability to the sports ecosystem. The contracts that the media has with the leagues, teams, and even conferences in collegiate athletics provide a level of stability when it comes to revenue streams that those entities can count on year to year. And for the most part, large American sport franchises and leagues rely on the media contract as a prediction of what they can spend on salaries.

Most of the North American leagues have salary caps that are loosely tied to the growth in media contracts. Therefore, as the media contracts increase, it ups the amount that the teams can spend on their players. It’s typical for both the media contracts and collective bargaining agreements that govern players to have coterminous maturity. This means that the contracts will mature around the same time. They do this because the media outlets want to know that the teams will be playing, and the teams and/or players want to know that the media revenues will be available to pay them.

Do you want to learn more about how media deals with sports teams work? If so, you can learn about sports management and global sports marketing with online sports management education. There’s no better way to get the sports management education you’re looking for without leaving your home.

Part of a good online sports management education includes understanding how sponsorships affect sports. Sponsorships are major sources of revenue for sports management teams and athletes, but they can cause problems.

In 2015, Nick Symmonds was a successful American athlete who dominated in global sports events. He was an 800-meter runner and an eight-time national champion. He had competed in multiple Olympic Games and was about to compete in the track and field world championships with Team USA.

His personal sponsor was Brooks Running, but Nike sponsored the USA track and field team. All the athletes had to sign a release saying that they would only wear Nike products while representing Team USA. This type of conflict isn’t something typically covered in sports management education.

Symmonds felt that it was unclear if or when he could wear his Brooks Running gear. He refused to sign the release and had to forfeit his eligibility to compete in the world championships.

Sports sponsorships are definitely something that can impact athletes in their careers if these kinds of rivalries crop up and they’re asked to represent one brand as part of a group while as individuals they’re supposed to represent another.