SPORTS NEWS YOU CAN USE

Issue 2--Sports Promotion

One of the easiest ways to break into the sports business is to become a promoter. The concept is fairly simple:

1. Come up with an idea that you think fans will pay to watch.
2. Find athletes willing to participate in the event.
3. Find a place to stage the event.
4. Publicize the event.
5. Sell tickets and put the event on.
6. If you make money, do it again next year or in a different place or with different athletes.

The problem is that it costs money to get things started. You may have to pay some bills up front. And there's always the risk that the event will be poorly attended and you'll lose money. Therefore, it's wise to start small.

It's even wiser to gain some experience first before you go out on your own. The best background for this career is to either work for an arena manager or for another promoter. Actually you may even learn more if you work for a rock or country music promoter than a sports promoter because the volume of events is usually much bigger and the people involved are often more experienced.

Once you know how to run successful sporting events, you need to build on this experience. Rather than promoting a series of one-time events, turn your successes into "branded" events.

1. Copyright the name of the event. Register trademarks that you can use on spin-off merchandise.
2. Develop contracts which encourage participating athletes to favor your events over those offered by your competitors.
3. Think in terms of "owning" your event rather than just originating it. Create something which will become a classic, to be run by you on a continuing basis.

Three examples of sports promotion:

• Although snowboards were being manufactured in the early 1980s, the companies making them weren't organized yet. No one was promoting the industry until 1988 when Rick Alden and Jim Gardner started the Rocky Mountain Snowboard Jam, the first snowboarding pageant/contest/exhibition. They expected 100 attendees per day but got 500.

Gardner and Alden went on to form National Snowboard Inc., a snowboarding membership association, which offered SHREDamericard, a member discount card.

A Rocky Mountain News reporter wrote this about them in 1992: "Gardner and Alden did not invent snowboarding, but they distilled it, translated it and marketed it. They were instrumental in making snowboarding an industry and not just another youth-culture fad."

• Terry Murphy started Hoop-It-Up basketball tournaments. He was a Dallas magazine publisher when he decided to stage a 3-on-3 streetball tournament in 1986 to raise money for charity. The event was off to a slow start. A week before the tournament, only 40 teams had signed up. But within a few days, 450 entries came in.

The following year, 1,406 teams entered the tournament.

In 1988, realizing that more than 2,000 teams would be involved, Murphy quit his job with the magazine and decided to take his tournament national. In order to fund his tournament, he needed sponsorship. He found it in Pepsi and Pizza Hut.

In 1989, Murphy staged 18 tournaments around the country. That left him nearly $300,000 in debt. He received financial help from two investors.

In 1991, NBC became involved and broadcast the tournament, which also became the official 3-on-3 streetball tournament of the NBA.

By 1992, Hoop-It-Up tournaments attracted 150,000 players and more than one million fans. In 1995, Hoop-It-Up was in 65 cities with more than 500,000 players and in 1996, in 78 cities (24 of them in Europe).

By 1993, Murphy's company, Streetball Partners International Inc., was also promoting Air-It-Out (flag football), Spike-It-Up (volleyball), and Pitch, Hit & Run (baseball). And in 1995, it added NHL Breakout (street hockey).

• The Los Angeles Marathon was created primarily as a way to market Los Angeles. Bill Burke was the promoter who put it together. He came to the job with a background in California politics and having served as commissioner of tennis for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. After the games ended, he formed his own special events company. When the City Council solicited proposals for a marathon in 1984, Burke submitted his.

Burke hired experienced people to run the event including the race coordinator for the New York City Marathon, a manager of pro tennis tournaments, and administrative and accounting employees from the Olympics staff. He also did research to find out what runners wanted in the marathon.

His efforts were successful. For the first marathon in 1986, he hoped to attract 2,500 runners. He got 10,787. However, the race also ended up $357,000 in the red. Burke calculated that each runner COST the race $135 in expenses (i.e., insurance, promotion, salaries, office supplies, cleanup).

Burke has continued to operate the Los Angeles Marathon. (It is a year-round business and has a budget of over $10 million a year). He generates money to run it by selling sponsorships which range from several hundred thousand to over a million dollars each and by cutting attractive financial deals with the city.

RESOURCES: If you are seriously thinking about promoting an event, take a look at this book:

The Ultimate Guide to Sport Event Management & Marketing, by Stedman Graham, Joe Jeff Goldblatt, and Lisa Delpy. Chicago: Richard D. Irwin, Inc. 1995.

It contains a number of comprehensive checklists for planning and staging sports events.

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