Navigating Electronic Sports Management in Arlington, Texas

In Arlington, Texas, there’s an interesting example emerging. The Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League, one of the most recognizable franchises, with its five-point blue star, plays its home games in Arlington, Texas. Right next door, the Texas Rangers (Major League Baseball) play their home games in a current stadium and they’re going to soon move into a new ballpark. That’s interesting enough, just to look at that part of the ecosystem and those relationships. What builds on that is some development called Texas Live, which is really an entertainment complex that’s (in ways) connected to where the Cowboys play and where the Rangers play.

Part of this growing campus of sorts in Arlington, there’s also the city building, which will be the largest Esports stadium in the United States. We start to see the emergence of, not only sports facilities being connected, but the community connected in a different way. It’s sports. It’s entertainment. It’s really the way people live, and these developments signal a real shift. They’re not just about driving the economics of a community, but it’s really overseeing something driving the society and the social aspects – the reasons that you would want to live in a place.

A New Way to Look at Global Sports

The Esports stadium in Arlington, Texas, is a little bit due in part to some work that the NYU Tish Institute did with the United States Conference of Mayors, Professional Sports Alliance, and the city of Arlington. After looking at the Dallas Cowboys calling the city home, the Texas Rangers calling the city home, and other growth and development in terms of sports and entertainment, one of the questions the mayor of Arlington asked, “What’s our next play in sports? What should we do next?” The Tish Institute, in this project partnership with the conference of mayors, was able to send a project team of graduate students in a capstone nearing completion of their program (overseen by faculty), to work through this question that the mayor had. Working directly with the mayor’s office, the city staff, and the Convention Visitors Bureau, what came out, was Esports and video gaming.

In today’s times, especially with online sports management education, it would seem like that would be the obvious thing to do, the next natural thing to do. Esports seems to be so exciting. It’s hot. How could you go wrong with it? It wasn’t quite that simple. Of course, these things have to be thoughtful and thought out. You have to have the infrastructure and the financing as well as willingness and an interest to get involved in emerging activity like Esports. But what the mayor’s office and Convention Visitors Bureau saw, through this relationship between them and NYU Tish Institute and the conference of mayors, was that Arlington was, in fact, primed as a location for Esports. City leaders took that idea and the research behind it and the next thing you know, is the announcement of what will be the largest sports stadium in the United States.

Accessing Electronic Sports Management Education

Esports is actually a number of different activities across a number of different video game titles, across a number of different video game platforms. In a way, Esports and the excitement around it, is everything that we love about sports. Esports is really for everyone. Any city can do it because any business can be involved in it. The reason any business can be involved in it is because any person can be involved in it. Anybody can participate in Esports.

What led Arlington to Esports and to move forward on it is, first and foremost, a willingness by city leadership to ask questions about where they might go next and a willingness to look at the entire sports landscape. They were willing to look at the entire landscape, travel and tourism, and the way businesses work.

We look at it and say, “Well, they must have been taking quite a risk, or at least an educated risk.” But it’s no different than any other decision to do something. In this example, what Arlington has going for it, and the big reason that it went for Esports and to build a large Esports stadium in the United States, is because the leadership there could see how connected it was. They could see how connected Esports is to what people are looking for as residents in the community and as travelers to a community.

New Developments in Sports and Science Technology

New developments in neuroscience is opening up new ways for athletes and coaches to monitor sports management. It’s something essential to today’s sports management education or online sports management education.

Neuroscience allows sports teams to gain an edge. Monitoring brainwave activity while athletes are practicing their craft can give teams real insights into a player’s strengths and weaknesses. Now, in addition to being an evaluative tool, it can also be a valuable coaching device and development tool.

One example of the application of this technology is a company called deCervo, which is helping teams assess baseball players’ reaction time to identifying pitches. One of the most important skills a batter can have is the ability to quickly identify pitch type, balls and strikes. Some players have a natural ability to make quick accurate judgments. Those players are in high demand. We’ve also learned that other athletes can hone those skills through training.

Many sports organizations have invested in tech startups. Sports teams have joined forces with venture capitalists to create accelerators, incubators, and other early-stage platforms for new technology and ideas to grow into viable businesses.

One of the pioneers in this area is the Los Angeles Dodgers. They were one of the first to do this. They formed an organization called Global Sports Venture Studio. It’s led to the development of more than a dozen companies, including two that have become forces in the sports tech space: Kinduct and ShotTracker.

Major League Soccer is also in this accelerator space, hoping to develop companies that take fan engagement or even player development to the next level.

Online Sports Management Education and Biometric Data

Wearable technology is really becoming an important aspect of data capture for sports teams and for the athletes themselves. And where it really comes into play is in the continuous flow sports like basketball or soccer. What you’ll find is that in these continuous flow sports, you’re monitoring a lot of the biometric data and information. And you’re measuring levels of hydration. You’re measuring fatigue. You’re measuring stamina. You’re measuring heart rate. You can look at a soccer player as he or she runs up and down the field of play and understand how all of these measurements I just mentioned change with their exertion level.

And this is a way to catch fatigue when it’s going to occur. It’s also a way to build stamina. We understand where the limits are and where the decline comes. How do you push past that and build stamina in these athletes?

There are several issues with wearables and the biometric and health data that it captures. There are the HIPAA regulations which prevent, without the athletes authorization, the open sharing of that information. So, it’s not like teams can freely pass it to one another. Secondly, from an athlete standpoint, he or she may feel that they own that data.

It’s about their body and their personal biometric data. This is a very sensitive issue in sports management. And, in global sports, it’s an issue that players’ unions are very involved in. They’re involved in negotiations with leagues and are trying to implement standards to protect the athlete.

This information is something a reputable sports management education will cover.

Online Sports Management Education and Global Sports Careers

“What advice do you give to sports management students as they’re approaching their career or ready to make a change in their career?” asks Laurajean Holmgren.

Bess Brodsky replies, “One of the first things that I tell people is that they have to take responsibility for their career, and they really have to craft a plan. What’s so interesting to me is the number of students and young professionals that I meet with so many different interests, different passions, and different directions that they want to go in the industry. So it’s not a simple answer to say, ‘You should do this’ or ‘You should do that.’ It’s really important to create an individual plan.

“At the start, you must have a good resume and a good LinkedIn profile,” Brodsky continues. “As we progress in our career it’s fine to look at your resume, but what’s really important is that it needs to outline the skill sets that you bring to the table so that a potential employer can really understand what you can do for them. How can you be a solution to their need to fill a role?”

The Importance of Resumes and LinkedIn in Sports Management Education

Brodsky notes that while there are many different styles of resumes, it’s always important for job seekers to explain their qualifications in terms of quantifiable accomplishments vs. broad statements. “I don’t like resumes where I see, ‘I’m responsible for …’ ‘Responsible for’ doesn’t actually mean that you even did it. It means you were responsible for it. Maybe somebody on your staff did it,” Brodsky says. “So, I really stress with people the importance of outlining what it is that they did so that a potential employer can understand what it is they bring to the table.”

She points out that a LinkedIn profile offers “an opportunity to be a little bit more creative … like painting a picture of yourself and who you are.” It’s an opportunity to highlight your skill sets, post a video or a link to a personal website, and include recommendations from former colleagues and employers, she explains. “It’s really an opportunity for somebody to go online and see a portrait of who you are. And I know many people that have been offered jobs just based on somebody reaching out to them via their LinkedIn profile. So those are the two most important things that I see.”

Holmgren agrees. “Right, it’s not just the what, it’s how you’re doing it,” she says. “We often say that students should take a plan and approach their career in a way that shows they know what they want, build the steps towards where they want to go. Does the next job have some of the attributes that match their personality and what they’re really looking for?”

“Exactly!” Brodsky declares. “I think what’s really important as you go on through your career is that you build your personal brand. One of the things that I work with students on is to develop what we call the ‘wow, how, and now’ statement. … You want to tell somebody something that’s going to make them go, ‘Wow!’ And then you want to go into how you got there and what you are doing now.

“So mine would be: ‘After working as an attorney, working as a vice president of sponsorship at Madison Square Garden, and working with top corporations and athletes, I’ve transitioned into being a career counselor and working on navigating career journeys with young professionals in the sports and entertainment industry.’ So you know that I was an attorney, you know I worked at Madison Square Garden, and you know I transitioned. And I told you that in just 20 or 30 seconds.”

Creating a Successful Social Media Profile

Although, when developing their personal branding statements, some people want to give a detailed account of their careers including each job title, Brodsky stresses the importance of an “elevator pitch” to use at a networking event, at a party, or even in an actual elevator, to “succinctly tell somebody who you are and what you’re looking for, so they can get an idea of how they can help you.” She adds that a social media presence, especially on Twitter and Facebook, is also very important.

“And LinkedIn,” Holmgren chimes in. “With LinkedIn, finding your voice on social platforms is crucial — not only being able to post professionally what relates to you and what your voice is, but it’s also something that really creates your brand online.” She goes on to explain that on LinkedIn, best practices include finding articles worth sharing as well as taking a valuable thought of your own and putting it down on paper.

Holmgren notes that great faculty members who often share best practices emphasize the importance of making sure that you find your fit. “That’s what I’m doing now,” she says. “I tend to focus on specific areas of sports that I’m passionate about. That may not speak to exactly what I’m doing right now, but if I want to take the next step, you can see what my voice is online.”

“In this day and age, it’s really important to have a professional profile,” Brodsky says, adding that LinkedIn is the best vehicle for it. “So if you have a Facebook page and that’s going to be about your personal life, keep that to your personal life,” she advises. “There’s the personal and the professional, and it’s really important, especially with young people and millennials, to keep those separate. You really want to be as professional as possible.”

Online Sports Management Education and How We Watch Sports

There are many different screens in terms of the way people watch global sports. But the first screen is actually live sports, right? The second screen is television, and this is my view of this. And the third screen is really your mobile device.

Imagine this. You’re at home watching something on television that you like. And it’s being displayed with multiple angles or multiple feeds through live streaming. I use the Masters, a golf tournament, as a great example. You might watch the live television feed on CBS.

But masters.com might have several different feeds on their app that could be done from a mobile standpoint. So, the second screen would be TV. The third screen would be your mobile app or your iPad, if you like, or your tablet.

Sometimes I will watch TV and have a computer and a mobile device, all at the same time watching things. I mean it’s somewhat like when you go into a sports bar and you’re watching a lot of different games all at one time.

Our Sports Management Education courses dissect how we watch sports and how sports management organizations feed us sports information.

Online Sports Management Education and Module Overview

Today, we will be talking about sports media and marketing. We are going to cover a multitude of topics regarding sports management education. We will talk about the evolution of sports media. In particular, we will discuss how it relates to social media and what the advent of social media means for certain global sports organizations.

Building Brands

We will be talking about how to promote a given sports athlete or a given team. In that, we will also discuss the branding process and marketing mix of sports management. This includes the four P’s and how they can be utilized to build up a particular brand. Branding is one of the most important things for sports organizations. We will also touch on sponsorship and how it can come back to help promote and build brands. In addition to all of this, we will also go over the event arena space, including how it can also help build brands.

How Sporting Venues Bring Communities Together

There have been many different examples of sports venues, arenas, and stadiums in different communities, and as it tends to be with anything, there are examples when they have worked to improve the community and examples when they haven’t. However, it’s always good to focus on the positives and strengths and the examples of good things that have happened.

All you have to do is look back through history, and you’ll see many examples of people coming together through sports. It’s part of just about any civilization. If you think about your wildest dreams of where you’d like to travel, and consider distant, far-off places, there’s a very good chance that somewhere along that trip you would come across some sort of a sports venue or complex.

One amazing, famous example is the Colosseum in Rome. For the people who lived in that place and time, it served as a main gathering place. For the most part, that hasn’t really changed between then and now. Our sports venues still serve as gathering places for the people in our cities and communities. Granted, they sometimes cost a little bit more money to access than some of the other places we might gather, but they truly are designed for the community aspect.

These venues are designed to grow communities. They’re designed to make people feel better about where they live, to improve their quality of life, and to help give them things that we’re all looking for, such as happiness.

One of the tough things about building sports venues is that they tend to cost quite a bit of money. And, no matter how much a team or franchise or private business is contributing to it, there is at some point going to end up being some public cost. There just isn’t much getting around it. That being said, in a large number of cases, it ends up being worth the cost. When done right, and when done with the community in mind and starting out in the community, it may take some time, but usually, good things tend to happen.

For more information about the pros and cons of sporting venues, sports management strategies, global sports marketing, and many other concepts, give online sports management education a chance. It’s by far the most convenient way to access sports management education, and it may just be a great fit for you.

How Sports and Competition Bring Us Together as People

Sports have the uncanny ability to bring people together as very few other things can. Part of the reason for this is that with any sport, the construct of the game is all about fair play. When people participate, they know that they’re competing against other people, and that’s what helps to bring them together. Regardless of their differences or personal beliefs, or any disputes they may have had, when they’re on the field of play, they’re on equal footing.

Sports as a Unifying Force: Embracing the Positives and Confronting the Flaws

Sports represent the ultimate neutral ground, and there’s something about being on neutral ground that draws people together. While playing a sport has positive value and offers a lot of good things, it also has its flaws, just like many of the other activities in life that we participate in and gain value from. With the positives come negatives, like the cheating and the scandals that we see all the time. Athletes even use drugs to gain an edge over their competition.

The Role of Programming in Sports: Building Character and Avoiding Pitfalls

When it comes to the positive aspects of sports, though, it really comes down to programming. Playing a sport in and of itself does not make someone a strong or good person. It doesn’t make them a dedicated or disciplined person, either. What really builds these qualities in people is good coaching and good programming. Those in the coaching and programming ranks have to be strategic and purposeful. If they aren’t, you end up with sports programs like the one represented in the show “Friday Night Lights.” The show is about high school football in San Antonio, Texas, and some of the programming that’s shown is difficult to watch. The way that the coaches treat these children, and the things that they teach them at such a young age, are really mortifying. So, make no mistake: Programming matters.

Sports Management Education: Kickstart Your Winning Career with Yellowbrick

And if you want to instill these positive values and outcomes in people, it’s really important that you’re deliberate and strategic with the way that you’re teaching them. Sports management education is an excellent way to learn the best ways to accomplish these goals. For anyone looking to learn more about global sports or sports management, online sports management education is an excellent place to start. Start your journey with online courses at Yellowbrick! Unleash your potential, master global sports, and score success in this dynamic industry. Join Yellowbrick and kickstart your winning career today!

How Sports Can Bridge Cultural and Social Differences

In sports management education, you may learn about how sports can affect social change. Currently, there are a lot of great programs out there that are really trying to make a difference in the world, and they’re using athletics as a hook to get people involved and helping with those social changes. For example, there are entities out there that use soccer as a way to get children participating in the sport, and then educate them on certain things.

It could also be to help communities in certain ways. Maybe they live in a very poor area and they don’t really have any opportunities. So, these programs go out and offer opportunities to kids who would never have a chance to play, and with that, they also give them some type of education or support in what they need.

One example of this is in India, where women historically have not been educated well on their own reproductive systems. And so, there are programs out there that offer soccer, and the girls show up and play. It works great as a hook because they want to come play soccer, and when they do, the program educates them on how to take care of themselves, what feminine hygiene is, about the organs that are involved in reproduction, and the things that they will go through as they transition into womanhood.

These programs are a great opportunity to, for one, change the way that culture sees women and reproduction, which has been a real problem. Athletics can also offer the girls an education in a way that they never would have had if they hadn’t participated in the soccer program.

There are many other examples out there that are about peace. For one, there are refugee programs, in camps where people have been transitioning into different cultures. And there’s a lot of culture shock that goes on. Some of them are living in camps. These people have been completely uprooted and taken into a new area. Sports offer them an opportunity to feel good about themselves, to give them a break and escape from their current situations. It can also start to bridge gaps.

We have a lot of culture clashes happening with all of the movements, and sports are a great way to bridge those gaps and allow people to have a common language. For example, we both may be from different areas, but we both play and enjoy soccer.

A result of this is that it really provides an opportunity to start having a conversation about differences and the culture shock that’s happening. It gives people something that they know, understand and can grow in. Sports programs and entities that are offering these kinds of solutions are really helping a lot of people in a lot of different ways.

Online sports management education is a convenient and effective way for anyone who’s interested to learn more about how athletics can bridge people’s differences and lots of other concepts relating to sports management and global sports issues.

How Sports Can Give People Common Ground

One thing you may learn about in sports management education, in relation to global sports, is how they can create common ground between people. These days, sports are being used in global diplomacy, because it allows us to go across cultural lines. It allows us to potentially move beyond conflict because it’s a common thing we can talk about.

Sports are a safe thing we can talk about, or participate in, for that matter. So, they really open the door for opportunities to talk. One really prominent example of this is what they call ping pong diplomacy.

China and the United States did not have very much contact, and in fact, they called it the red curtain, and we couldn’t seem to get beyond that. But, president Nixon was able to begin conversations with China through table tennis. The Chinese, of course, are incredibly gifted at table tennis. When the United States brought a team over to play with them, just that act of participating in something that both countries did enabled a new conversation to happen.

And so, while it was a really big event, and it was, to some degree, maybe a political stunt to do that, it did start the conversation. This shows that it really can, if done properly and strategically, begin conversations because we can find commonality. And that’s really the most important part when we talk about how we can get through barriers or how we can move beyond conflict.

It’s about finding commonality, and that is the starting point. Once you can find things to talk about in common, then potentially the more difficult things can be discussed a little bit differently.

The UN has a number of different programs for women and equality. They’ll use sports as a means to provide new opportunities, or just any opportunities for women, especially in developing areas. Again, they’ll engage with nonprofits, like The Power of Play, for example, out of Sweden, that give opportunities to participate in sport.

Other ways are just, again, trying to use sports as a hook to make people feel more comfortable, to educate them, to give them a sense of security with something that they know. In the case of refugees, they’re ripped out of their homes. They’ve lost everything that they know. They’re plopped into a new culture, and that’s a lot of change to endure, but they do know soccer.

Soccer is something that’s familiar to them, and it’s something that can, again, begin to bridge those gaps between new and old cultures and begin to help us see where commonalities lie. This allows us to begin to build an understanding, and hopefully, to change a life.

You can learn more about how global sports bring people together, in addition to all things related to sports management with online sports management education. All you need to get started is an internet connection, and a passion for learning and exploring new concepts.