Foundations

When I sat down to create the new Sports Marketing and Media Bachelor's degree at Full Sail University, I drafted a team to figure out what the industry was saying about itself.  That is, what could people working in the industry tell us about the problems and needs in the industry, particularly from a labor force that we were about to help create and invent.

What we heard back, with near unanimity, was that sports-based industries were having difficulty connecting their dynamic Gen-X sales and sponsorship people, with the communications technology used by the Millennials.  It's not that the guys in their 40's couldn't use a Macbook or Twitter, but that they didn't really know how to converse with the people in the medium in them.  There are few people speaking to this generational break better than Don Tapscott, who writes about it in his book "Grown Up Digital.

From this, and from my own experiences having been in the business, we also discovered that many sports businesses are so consumed by their own day-to-day operations, that they lose sight of what it really means to connect, and the importance of connecting in a world in which it is difficult to be heard above the cacophony of businesses (particularly in sports), who attempt to compete for your attention.  To that end, Sally Hogshead is very much at the forefront of modern thought.  Her message is mostly about personal branding, which has some resonance in sports in a very defined niche, but it can be expanded to reach into general thoughts about standing out in a crowded world.

And of course, for current thought, nothing stands out like Sports Business Journal, as an in-industry chronicle of the different ways in which sports businesses and individuals are working and thinking about different problems within the industry.

These are just a couple of the resources that provide, in different measures, some of the core ingredients that make up the recipe of our degree program.  It is a living and breathing degree program and thus it moves fluidly.

My interest goes beyond just that which we create for our students.  My interests are also about the business decisions and partnerships which support our degree, and the really interesting partnerships and activations I get to observe in researching the degree.  I also love getting to put these kinds of deals together and to build something really interesting, new and creative, and as I develop this blog I think it will be as much about exploring the depths of great partnerships as it will be about the problems we pose for our students.

Thanks for taking a peek behind our curtain...we'll reveal more as time goes on!