The way youth sports worked in the past, when we were kids, we would play a different sport every season. We would play a winter sport in the winter, and then we would change with the season. We’d play a spring sport in the spring, a summer sport in the summer, and a fall sport in the fall. These days, as early as 10 years old, kids have to choose. They’re told to choose a sport and then told that they’re going to play it year-round.

This is called specialization. The theory behind it is that if you play one sport year-round, you get better at it, right? Most people know the story of Tiger Woods. Ever since he was a little kid, he only played golf, and he became Tiger Woods. Then there’s Andre Agassi who went to tennis academies since he was young and became Andre Agassi. The theory makes sense, but ultimately, it’s wrong. All of the evidence shows that it doesn’t actually work that way.

The evidence shows that there are two main things that happen to kids when they play the same sport over and over again. One of them is burnout. Over time, they get bored. It starts to feel like work or homework. And if the message to them is that they have to get good at it or why bother playing it, that takes the fun out of it, and they end up quitting.

The second thing that tends to happen is a little worse. They tend to get injured because they’re playing the same sport over and over again. They get a lot of repetitive stress injuries. Currently, there is an epidemic of ACL tears among young girls—16-year-old girls who have knees like 60-year-olds. There is also a strange phenomenon of Tommy John arm surgeries being done on 12-year-olds because they’ve thrown too many pitches.

This whole crazy culture, driven by parents who are obsessed with their kids making it pro, has led to this horrible rate of burnout and injury at the youth level. It’s happening because of this notion that kids have to specialize at a super young age to have any shot of making it. Not only does this suck the fun out of the game, but it also makes it more difficult to achieve that greatness later in life, because you’re running the risk of actually blowing out essential parts of your body.

A lot of the data that we have today suggests that some of the best athletes were multi-sport athletes until they made it to their final year of college. Stephen Curry and Russell Wilson are a couple of great examples of this, and with guys like Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, we also have examples of great multi-sport athletes from the past. Not only does going this route help a person achieve greatness later in life, but it also makes sure that the values of sports stay protected: having fun, enjoying yourself, and keeping the right amount of balance.

You can learn more about a wide variety of sports topics, including sports management concepts and strategies, global sports trends and marketing, and many others with online sports management education. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to achieve your sports management education on your own schedule and from your own home.

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.

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.

I definitely think that organizations need to be able to identify who their target markets are and understand that they’re very different. I think as we are progressing, we’re starting to see that there are some very big differences in fans based on generational contrasts. For example, Millennials and Gen Z fans are consuming sports in a much different way than previous generations like Gen X or Baby Boomers. Instead of actually sitting down and watching full games, we find that Millennials and Gen Z’s are more inclined to watch really short snippets. They just want to see highlights. A lot of what they’re doing is digital so they’re looking at their phones or looking at an iPad to get their information, which means it might be coming in from an app and alerting them via notifications.

They are not necessarily watching sport in the same way, where they sit down in front of the TV for three hours to watch a game. Instead, they’ll get quick highlights and snippets here and there. It’s really important for sports management and organizations to be able to understand those consumption patterns and habits so they can package their sport in a way that reaches all fans. We still have generations who want to watch that full game, but I think it’s also very important for organizations to understand how they can still get fans to attend games. Depending on the market and the location, it could take hours out of a person’s day just to travel to the stadium, attend the event, and get home afterward. It is important to find easier ways for that to take place for people to be able to get there and then make sure that when they’re actually there, they have a lot of different entertainment options. In actuality, it can be an all-day event for that fan.

Online Sports Management Education and Consumer Statistics

In today’s world where we have so much more technology, it’s much easier for organizations to track who their fans are. If someone buys a ticket online, or if they buy it through a mobile device and use the electronic ticket, organizations are able to track who that customer is as well as the demographic information about them. Additionally, they can sometimes follow what they’re buying at the stadium if they’re making their purchases through the app.

A lot of teams and a lot of stadiums are now moving to have specific apps that fans can use, and that all helps to track and understand who those consumers are. Sports management education tells us the other great thing about mobile ticketing is that if someone purchases a ticket and then sells it, it allows them to track when the transaction took place, who sold a ticket, and who purchased it. When that scenario happened in the past on the secondary ticket market, teams never knew who those consumers actually were that were in the seats. Now, they can continue to track and have the most accurate data about their fans.

Another one of the nice things with digital is that it allows for more personalization. For example, an organization might be promoting something, but they’re also able to have a one on one interaction with fans. Basically, if a fan sees a promotional post on social media, they can type a response and the organization might respond back to them. The same thing is happening with athletes, where there’s this much deep connection now between athletes and fans, but also sport organizations and fans because there’s so much opportunity for two-way communication.

When people ask me about legal concepts in sports, I think more about how to bring the best ownership to the table and how to allow for more owners to participate in the league. Each league has different restrictions as far as ownership and sports management are concerned. There are restrictions that limit how much debt or leverage an owner can have, and even rules for who can be an owner and how much responsibility a general partner should have.

And so, the legal side of owning a sports franchise starts with team agreements and franchise agreements. These are typically complex documents, but they describe how owners have to perform within a league.

An owner needs to understand how much of a team they are allowed to own and how much they can borrow to purchase a team. Can they have limited partners? Are they allowed to have corporate ownership or outside ownership? What kind of information flows to the team owners and the league, and how does that information help owners?

The franchise agreement is a very, very interesting agreement, and it has evolved. It’s changed the way the National Football League does business as it’s tried to increase the value of its franchises.

The only way to increase the value of NFL franchises in the world of global sports is to increase the audience that may be able to buy a franchise. One way to do that is to allow for cross-ownership or to allow for owners of other sports teams in different cities to own NFL franchises. That’s a new way that they’ve tackled the issue in addition to making sports management education and online sports management education more accessible to potential franchise owners.

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.

When you look at current-day sports, leagues and teams are facing new competition from streaming services that take niche sports directly to consumers. The World Surf League, karate, and other sports see OTT, or over the top, as the best way to reach out to fans and build their sport. The average fan of sporting events only has so much time that they can dedicate to them.

Even minor sporting events and leagues that are distributed over the top are cutting into the viewership pie. And they’re cutting it into many more pieces. When a sport brand or league goes OTT, it has many advantages, particularly for upstart leagues and sports: very low cost of production, low cost of distribution, and great data capturing that they get back from their viewers and fans. Additionally, fans can also get to interact with said brand.

This means that even if fans are sitting at home in front of a TV, they might prefer to watch it streamed. We’re also beginning to see the combination of live streaming with social media. Young fans, especially Generation Z, want to experience games in multiple ways, viewing a broadcast live from wherever they are and with their communities.

This means that they want to combine live streaming with social media platforms, where they can analyze, celebrate, or even commiserate with like-minded or rival fans. One interesting player in this OTT space is Endeavor. It bought sporting leagues, like UFC and PBR (Professional Bull-Riding), to build an OTT network. Endeavor also bought NeuLion, which was one of the OTT providers to many other sport properties.

Another thing happening is that to capitalize on the exciting fourth quarter of NBA games, and also possibly to capitalize on the legalization of sport betting in many states, the NBA has taken to selling the fourth quarter of games over the internet. These games will be sold at a discount to the NBA League Pass price of a full game, but it will also give fans a chance to tune in to the key finishes of games.

By exploring online sports management education, you’ll learn more about niche, major, and global sports, as well as lessons regarding careers in sports management and recent trends in the industry. Why not jump on the valuable opportunity to start your sports management education online right now?

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.

There are really two things happening here in global sports. One is we’re talking about how people consume sports. The sports ecosystem is really all oriented toward how people consume sports. And some of it is “live” and “in person” in a traditional way: that’s going to the stadium, or in some ways, going to a bar or a restaurant, and hanging out with other people. Some of it is consuming it just on your own and much closer to home.

The future of the esports ecosystem really is in, let’s use a buzzword, connectivity — meaning that all the things that are out there that make up this sports ecosystem, whether it’s live at a venue, whether it’s on the way to the venue, if it’s in your home, wherever it is that you are consuming sports — that’s where the future of this ecosystem is.

It’s no longer just about being in one place. It’s about being in one place and having access to everything everywhere.

Online Sports Management Education

During your sports management education studies, you need to focus on connectivity whenever possible. It’s important because the sports organization that you work for some day will rely on the sports ecosystem to thrive.