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People and Pop Culture

The Sit-Down: David Stotlar, University of Northern Colorado

A pioneering academic in sports management, retiring next year, reflects on the abundance of sports programs in academia, identifies the hallmarks of a great program, and highlights some of the trends in the industry.

I got into marketing because as a former coach, I was used to getting free clothing.

When we were going to Greece with the Olympic Academy, I wrote to a bunch of companies, including Levi’s, for apparel, and my marketing expertise began.

When I wanted to start teaching a sport marketing class [in the mid-1980s] there really weren’t any textbooks, so I had to write my own. By the early ’90s, some colleagues and I were putting together a library of our sport management books.

Photo by: TERRY LEFTON / STAFF
We really wanted to have a connection with the industry and focus on it. That’s been our focus, to try to connect academics to the industry, and I’m encouraged recently at how many teams are looking seriously at analytics and research.

The old style of marketing was product-oriented: Here’s what we have, now let’s go sell it. Now it’s more about making and selling what the market wants.

We haven’t moved that model into sponsorship. Too many people in sponsorship are just trying to move the inventory they’ve got to sell. They aren’t working with the sponsors to create anything new.

I’ve always enjoyed teaching [sports] marketing more than anything else, but there have been times when I wished I taught the history of the Civil War, so that I could just dust off last semester’s notes. Marketing is something that’s changing — often as I’m teaching about it.

When I started, I think there were three doctoral programs. [There are] around 600 or 700 graduate and undergraduate sport programs offering degrees in the U.S. now. That has caused some problems.

A lot of organizations and teams prey on interns and have no intent on ever hiring them. That bothers me. It’s market driven — students are enticed at working in this industry, although they don’t necessarily know how much work that entails when they are starting.

American sports is still very much the old model. Whether true or not, everyone thinks ads in the game are TiVo-proof, so I’m interested to see how long that model hangs on, because obviously it’s fading elsewhere.

The last bastion of commercialism for U.S. sports will be jersey advertising. I think Mark Cuban and some of the other NBA owners are pushing it there. I’m not sure if we’ll ever have a European model, where the sponsor’s logo is larger than the team’s.

We’re all still laughing about the video from the mid-1980s where everything at the Olympics was sponsored. It has 43 sponsor mentions in a two-minute video. I still use that one in my classes.

It starts to be a little bit numbing when everything in an arena or stadium is sponsored.

Too many academics don’t want to really look at the revenue side of the business, but it is a for-profit model, and even the not-for-profits are struggling to balance revenues and expenditures now.

People like Jim Kadlecek [University of Mount Union] and Bill Sutton [University of South Florida] are doing a great job now looking at sales, and there’s always more opportunity on that side.

It has been a slow process, but it is becoming more accepted to hire MBAs in sport management for key positions. The days when they hire an old coach or AD and put him in charge of a multimillion-dollar organization are done.

Our philosophy has always been to balance theory and practice. The program has been based on that. People who have graduated from the program really have carried that philosophy forward. We all do the consulting, and we stay in touch with the industry.

When shopping for a good [sports management] program, you should look for faculty first and curriculum second. Are the faculty engaged? Are they working in the industry, so they can provide connections, both for knowledge and networking?

Does it have a robust curriculum, or does it just seem to be a small part of some larger school? Those are key things.

The programs end up in a lot of schools within universities. The ideal place for a sport management program is in the business school, but some business schools want to disassociate themselves from it, because they don’t consider it a real science.

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