Bryant's Sports Marketing Association Profiled in National Magazine

Thinking Small

by Kenny Berkowitz

Even with a limited staff, you can still pull off all the new and exciting ideas for promoting women's basketball. At Bryant University, Director of Marketing and Promotions Mark Hodgkin has started the Sports Marketing Association, a group of student interns who receive neither pay nor class credit but a lot of hands-on experience in promotions.

"At the start of the last school year, I visited a handful of classes to give a five-minute talk about the Sports Marketing Association and invite students to apply for a spot in the group," Hodgkin says. "Because we have a strong business program with a lot of marketing and communications majors, it wasn't a hard sell. In fact, many more applications came in than I expected, and that was all I had to do to build a staff."

That first year, Hodgkin gathered a team of 13 student interns who designed posters, wrote press releases, updated the department's Web site, and posted information on social networking sites. They helped do Hodgkin's leg work too, distributing fliers, posters, and table cards around campus. On women's basketball game days, they took charge of greeting alumni and running half-time promotions.

"They also provide a lot of word-of-mouth advertising," says Hodgkin. "Everybody jokes about our army of interns, but at a small campus, if you have 13 people working with you, the word of mouth is incredibly powerful."

For a 2007 doubleheader against rival Bentley College, Bryant took a two-pronged approach, reaching both students and the community. To appeal to the college crowd, promoters flooded the campus with a "Come Early, Stay Late, Wear Black" campaign, offering anyone wearing black at the game a chance to win a flat screen HDTV. To reach the surrounding communities, there was a youth basketball game, a children's birthday party, and several weeks of advance press in the local media.

The result: the school's largest crowd ever. Over 1,450 fans came to the women's game, and 2,600 filled the arena for the men's game before Bryant started turning spectators away. "The whole week running up to the game, there was a sense of excitement," says Hodgkin. "We had a very diverse group of fans, with students sitting on one side and community members, faculty, and staff on the other."

The lesson, says Hodgkin, is that even a small staff working in between classes, meals, and studying can bring big results. "Ask yourself what it would take to make some small steps," advises Hodgkin, who plans to expand the Sports Marketing Association in the future. "Make a list to determine what it would cost to focus on women's basketball for a couple of hours a week-a list of five ideas is a great place to start. And once you do that, you'll realize there are a lot of worthwhile promotions you can organize in a short period of time."

-from Athletic Management Magazine

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