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| PBA Tour CEO Fred Schreyer
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FRED SCHREYER added CEO to his résumé with the PBA in September after serving as its Commissioner for over two years. He joined the organization in ‘00 as legal counsel; two years later, he was named COO and General Counsel. According to the Portland Business Journal, the privately owned group’s revenues have tripled since Schreyer’s arrival. The PBA has also experienced a growth in membership and has seen television ratings rise by nearly 20% in the last five years. Corporate sponsors (including its first-ever title sponsor, Denny’s) now number 20, and the PBA Tour has increased its total prize money to $5.6M. Schreyer has more than 25 years of experience in sports business. As director of sports marketing at Nike and founder of its sports management division, Schreyer negotiated
LEBRON JAMES’ endorsement deal with Nike. He was also the founding partner and owner of Pyramid Sports and negotiated deals with representatives for such athletes as
ANDRE AGASSI,
BO JACKSON,
MICHAEL JORDAN,
TIFFENY MILBRETT,
JERRY RICE,
DEION SANDERS and
NATALIE WILLIAMS. Schreyer spoke with SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry
Kavanagh.
| Favorite music: The classic Rolling Stones stuff. |
| Favorite Vacation spot: Anywhere with a great golf course. |
| Favorite Author: PHILIP ROTH. |
| Favorite Sporting event: The Final Four. |
| Last book read: A golf book, “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” by MARK FROST. |
| Typical day off: Playing golf with friends and then having a drink and playing some cards in the clubhouse. |
| Athletes you most enjoy watching: LeBron James, Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson. |
| Basic business philosophy: If you try to please everybody, you’re going to please nobody. You’ve got to be willing to take some chances and make the hard decisions that maybe in the short term are going to offend some people. |
| Best professional advice received: Be true to yourself, stick with your decisions and don’t blow with the wind based on everything that gets in your ear. |
| Best career decision: To go to the exempt tour at the PBA. That was very instrumental in repositioning the sport. |
| Biggest challenge: Clearly it is educating sponsors and fans to the difficulty and the attractiveness of the sport and making sponsors aware of the ability to market their products through association with our sport. |
Q: Have you applied anything you learned or used at Nike with the PBA?
Schreyer: Without question. One of the great skills I think you pick up at Nike is how to connect with the consumer and the athlete. Sports today is about entertainment and competition, and people want a reason to have an emotional connection to the athletes they’re watching. We came in with a real sense of wanting to create stars and develop some kind of emotional connection between the fans and the athletes. We really focused much more on individuals than had been done in the past. That was clearly something that we applied from our Nike days.
Q: Is there an emotional connection to the bowler as everyman?
Schreyer: In many regards that’s how bowlers are viewed. But the truth is, when you get to see the players on the tour, they really have pretty compelling personalities. Fans like to pick their favorites, whether they’re going to root for them or root against them. They like to have some sense of what that person stands for. Our athletes -- like athletes in any sport -- mean different things to different people. They all have different personalities and styles. Our job is to give them the forum in which to display those talents and help the viewer understand what’s going on.
Q: Have you had to battle some misperceptions or stereotypical thinking about bowling?
Schreyer: That’s been a big part of it from the beginning. A lot of people generally don’t think of bowlers as being great athletes. There have been some great bowling movies made over the years that poke fun at bowlers, portraying them as fat, out of shape, smoking and drinking but very good at a skill. Everybody likes those movies. But the reality is professional bowling at the level that’s being played today is a very, very different sport. So, yeah, clearly you want to overcome those, not only to draw in fans but really to draw in sponsors because sponsors are not necessarily attracted to that stereotype.
Q: Since you brought it up, what is the best bowling movie?
Schreyer: I personally love “The Big Lebowski.” “Kingpin” is another great one.
Q: Is bowling enjoying a renaissance? Some statistics point to that.
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Pete Weber One Of
PBA’s Star Attractions |
Schreyer: I think it’s enjoying a renaissance at the professional level and as a television property. As a participation sport, the numbers have always been extremely high. Bowling’s always been a very popular activity. The nature of the business of bowling has changed for the proprietors who own bowling centers. Their mix of play has changed dramatically over the years from regular weekly scheduled bowling leagues to recreational play.
The other big movement that’s going on as it relates to the business of bowling are the types of new centers that are being built. There’s a lot of stuff going on in bowling centers. You’re seeing bowling as the background to a night out with friends, not just bowling as bowling. The people who are exposed to the sport are changing, and that’s an opportunity for us to draw in a new consumer to professional bowling.
Q: You said you have essentially copied much of what the PGA Tour has done. What exactly have you copied?
Schreyer: We’ve applied some of the concepts to our tour. We’ve gone to what we call an exempt tour, a limited field. The standard PBA event now is 64 players, 58 of whom are exempt for the season and the other six who are filled through either a qualifying round or a weekly commissioner’s exemption.
Q: Are you also trying to appeal to a younger demographic?
Schreyer: That’s been a big part of our mission. Another stereotype is that bowling appeals just to adults 45 and older. Obviously, while that’s a big audience, it’s not necessarily the audience that appeals to marketers and it’s not necessarily the audience that’s going to sustain and fuel the growth of your sport. So, we’ve made a concerted effort to make our show more attractive to younger viewers. And that’s been one of our bright successes over the last few years. The numbers in our younger demographic have been going up significantly. We’re pleased with that and continue to make an effort to go that way without losing the core audience. But we want to bring in new viewers, and clearly we want to bring in younger viewers.
Q: How do you promote a sport that rarely makes headlines?
Schreyer: You fight and claw to get the publicity you can. Our relationship with ESPN has been very instrumental in helping us get back in the public consciousness. I think you have to be a little more creative, you have to identify consumers and interact with them in different ways. We use a lot of Internet-based strategies and we try to do things through our alliance which we have with the bowling proprietors and the organization that represents them. We try to connect with viewers and potential fans through programs that are implemented at bowling centers around the country. And we do sponsor-based things.
But you’re right: You don’t get the front page of the sports every day and you certainly are not on “SportsCenter” every night, so it’s a much different challenge. But it’s one that almost every sport, with the exception of the top four or five, faces. No one really gets a lot of time on mainstream television once you get beyond hockey, football, baseball, basketball and NASCAR. That’s it.
Q: Pro sports often look to boost recreational play as a way of creating interest in the games themselves. Does the PBA have any initiatives to bring in more recreational users?
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Schreyer Says Challenge Lies In Converting
Recreational Bowlers Into PBA Fans |
Schreyer: There’s been an effort not only in the PBA but in the sport in general to appeal to younger bowlers, and there’s a major movement in the country now to expand competitive bowling at the high school level. There are more and more high schools nationally and colleges offering bowling teams and youth programs. As a grassroots program, that’s big. Our challenge is a little different in the sense that we have extremely high recreational participation numbers. Our challenge is grabbing hold of the recreational bowlers and making them fans of professional bowling. The numbers are there: 70 million people age 6 and above bowl at least once a year. So, it’s not that there’s a lack of people showing up to go bowling. It’s making them aware of professional bowling and the skill level. That’s both an opportunity and a challenge for us.
Q: You have said, “It’s kind of fun to do your own thing and not deal with the bureaucracy of big companies or owners in other sports.”
Schreyer: No question one of the beauties of the PBA is that it’s privately owned. It was bought in 2000 by three investors, all of whom had worked together at one time or another at Microsoft. It’s a sport with a single ownership group, as opposed to the major sports, which obviously are collective organizations of individually owned teams with players unions and all those kinds of things. We don’t have that. So, it does provide the opportunity to design and implement programs that might be a little more difficult to do in a bigger sport. And obviously in a smaller organization you have the ability to make decisions and changes and implement them much more quickly and with far less resistance.
Q: How often do you bowl?
Schreyer: A couple of times a month, mostly when we’re out on tour with some of the people after a day’s competition. Unfortunately, because I travel so much, I don’t have time to bowl very regularly at home.
Q: Will you be joining the tour?
Schreyer: (laughing) Maybe I’ll give myself an exemption. No, I don’t think so. I’m a pretty good athlete, but I don’t think they hired me for my bowling talent.
Q: There’s never been a player/commissioner.
Schreyer: Maybe that could be my legacy.
