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.

A great example of an individual who utilizes these four P’s in a great manner to represent the brand vision is Maria Sharapova with her candy line, Sugarpova. This is an interesting unheard candy, but it’s possibly unheard of because it is representing what the brand adheres to. If you go on the Sugarpova website, you’ll see about them. What they want to get forth is that their brand vision is to be a premium candy company.

If that’s their brand goal in terms of being a premium candy company, she would want to utilize all four of the P’s to represent this brand vision. She utilizes her product to be a premium candy company because they are premium candy. They’re very well-made, and in terms of how she prices them, they’re actually very expensive. She doesn’t necessarily want to down price these candies because even if she did and the everyday consumer could buy a piece of candy they wouldn’t possibly want that from an organizational standpoint because it doesn’t represent the brand vision, which is a premium candy.

In terms of place, in terms of where you can actually buy the candy, you cannot buy it at Walmart. You cannot buy the candy at CVS. You’re actually only going to find the candy at high-class stores, at premium stores. This could be online. This could be at her shop, but you’re likely to find these candies at a premium store.

All of these things are representing the brand value in accordance to online sports management education. If you can do this as a sports organization, or in Maria Sharapova’s example, if you can do this as an athlete within global sports and utilize certain P’s to represent the brand vision, then you can better exemplify what your brand speaks toward. You can better build a relationship with your consumer and especially the consumer who wants what the brand offers. This would highlight effective sports management and brand vision throughout the organization.

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.

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.

If you’re from a sponsorship organization and you’re willing to spend a lot of money, you have to take into consideration where the eyes of the consumers will be watching. However, it’s not just about the eyes. It could also be about the ears. For example, baseball games will often refer to the seventh-inning stretch. There’s an opportunity here for global sports organizations and sponsorship organizations to put in their sponsorship. They could arrange it so that the seventh-inning stretch is brought to the fans by a particular organization.

If you’re a sports manager who’s in charge of operating sponsors and thinking in terms of placement, you need to consider where the organization will perceive that the consumers are concentrated the most. And perhaps you’ll want to associate your sponsor with something that is heard often. So, sponsors really have to get unique and creative in terms of how they can offer their sponsorship opportunity. A unique example is the New York Yankees.

The New York Yankees in Sports Management Sponsorship

The New York Yankees, when one of their pitchers records a strikeout, has a sponsorship in place with P.C. Richard & Son and their famous whistle. With each strikeout by a Yankees pitcher, the P.C. Richard whistle is played. This offers two incentives for the company. One, a formerly dead space is now a space for the P.C. Richard whistle. Two, it offers a unique instance where you can transfer over a positive feeling, associating the feeling of a Yankee pitcher striking somebody out with this P.C. Richard & Son whistle.

Lessons To Learn for Online Sports Management Education Scholars

With sports sponsors, you have to be careful of what we call clutter, when a sports organization has a vast number of sponsorship organizations all in one place. This eventually leads to the consumer being overloaded with message capacity. If they are overloaded with messages, even though there may be 20 sponsors available for viewership, none are actually being taken in because the consumer is perceiving that there’s an overload.

Once overload hits, the consumers are not likely to retain any more information. As a sponsor, you have to be really careful where you place your sponsorship sign, for example, because you don’t want it to be part of the clutter created by other signs. You want to make sure that it sticks out. You want to make sure that it’s unique. And you want to make sure that it’s remembered by the consumers.

There is a wide range of technologies that have come on the global sports scene in recent years that have had a significant impact on the ability to capture data used in sports management. Understanding how new technology continues to shape and change sports management is integral to sports management education and online sports management education.

One example would be wearable technology that athletes wear on their uniforms or on their bodies while they’re on the field to play. This would oftentimes be in a practice setting, but occasionally some of the leagues will allow it in an in-game setting as well. This device monitors biometric data information, such as health and fitness data and even fatigue. These are really important attributes when you’re trying to create a successful and team on the playing field.

Some of the other data that we’re beginning to use are things like eye-tracking data of fans sitting in an arena or a stadium. In doing so, we’re able to see where their eyes go over the course of the game. This means that we can tell sponsors who are advertising on either the large video screen, the outfield wall, or the sidelines how many eyeballs are on their signage. This is a way for us to value that and also give them a return on investment calculation for their sponsorship package, which includes signage.

Even concerning sports, you’ll hear the terms virtual reality, or VR, and augmented reality, AR, bandied about a bit. And just to clearly define the distinction between the two, augmented reality is taking something such as what an athlete’s performance is-and superimposing it on the screen, on the telecast that you’re getting, or the internet feed that you’re getting, and showing you while the game is happening live. So you’re still watching the game in two dimensions, but you’re getting all sorts of information that you didn’t use to have concerning what’s going on during the game.

Virtual reality is often delivered via headsets and will give you a three-dimensional experience as if you’re sitting in the arena. One of the exciting things about VR is the capability to sell a courtside center court seat to a game to someone who lives 6,000 miles away on the other side of the globe. It could happen with a virtual reality headset and the right camera set up so that that season ticket to a Golden State Warrior game or an LA Laker game can be sold to someone in Shanghai, China, or Berlin, where they could immerse themselves in the game by sitting in their living room, a restaurant, etc.

Perhaps someday this will be taught in online sports management education. How fascinating is it to imagine someone sitting in Berlin or Shanghai watching an LA Lakers game as if they’re sitting courtside? That’s what virtual reality can do. You’ll often hear the phrase MR, or mixed reality, which is taking a lot of the data and information we’ve been talking about, but overlaying it onto the field and players.

One of the ways in which the sports industry and sports management have changed and will continue to change has to do with integration, this almost perfect storm, of three factors.

The first is new technology for data-capture devices. Now we can capture data in so many different ways: wearable technology, high-speed cameras, radar that can do much more than it could ever do before. That is one factor.

The second factor is high-speed data processing technology. We’ve seen computers get faster and faster year after year. We’ve seen microchips get smaller. Therefore, processing power has dramatically increased compared to what it was even 5 or 10 years ago.

The third piece is inexpensive cloud data storage. The fact that we can capture more data, that we can store this data very inexpensively in the cloud, and that we can process this data quickly has not only led to an increase in sports data and analytics, but it’s also been a major factor in the technology and innovation aspects of global sports.

Online Sports Management Education

While pursuing a sports management education, you’ll receive extensive training related to this topic. Advances with data and technology have changed the game, so to speak, because they’ve changed almost every way in which we manage, promote, value and interact with the sports people love.

The New York Yankees logo is a classic example of sports licensing done right. It’s interesting. If you go all around New York City, there’s pretty good chance you’ll find a Yankees hat. The same thing is also true if you go to other places around the United States and even to some of the places around the world that observe global sports.

That logo, the interlocking NY, seems to be found everywhere, in big cities and in some of the farthest reaches. George Steinbrenner bought the ballclub for less than $10 million in the early 1970s, and it’s now worth, depending on whose numbers you’re looking at, about $4 billion. One of the things that he recognized was the power of the New York Yankees logo.

It was at a time where nobody was much thinking about taking that logo and putting it on all sorts of merchandise, promotions, and in as many places as possible in the right way, in the right context. Steinbrenner was able to not just put it out to everywhere, but put it out everywhere in the right way, at the right time, and with the right people. It’s a great example of sports management. Studying what he was able to do with that licensing is a key lesson to understand in sports management education and online sports management education.

One of the interesting areas of sports analytics is dynamic ticket pricing. Online sports management education explains this as a way that sales and marketing organizations within the front office of a professional sports team can impact revenues by pricing tickets dynamically. You may ask, “Well, what does that mean?” If you think back years ago, each ticket would have a static price. If the seat was in the 20th row at center ice or center court, or the middle of the football field, the 50-yard line, it essentially had one price for all games.

Today in many global sports, tickets are priced dynamically because we acknowledge that there’s different levels of demand based on the day of the week of the game. We also acknowledge the different levels based on the time of day that the game is being played and the opponent, including the star players that are coming in from the opposing teams. We even acknowledge the different levels if it’s an outdoor game based on the weather and the weather conditions.

It’s really important that we recognize that certain tickets might be worth two or three times as much under favorable conditions. If the Boston Red Sox are coming to play the Kansas City Royals and they’re playing on a Sunday afternoon in July, that ticket is going to be worth a lot more than if the Miami Marlins are coming in to play the Kansas City Royals on a Tuesday night in April. Those are the kinds of things that we can now capture.

Sports management education teaches us that there are algorithms and methods through data analysis. Looking at history and past history sales as well as ticket sales and pricing, we can assess what the relative demand is going to be for each of those games. We have mechanisms much like the stock exchange does so that we can price those tickets at a variable level. Sometimes teams will impose certain rules so that the tickets don’t float freely, but nonetheless they will vary. They’ll vary according to whatever parameters the team wants to permit them to vary based on the demand.