UMass Baseball League

A lot has happened since my last post. Halfway through my senior spring semester, I’m still on the job hunt. I have applied to a number of jobs, and made it to the final round of interviews with one. I have narrowed down my interests to social media, marketing (sport and other industries), and agency.

Two weeks ago, along with one of my peers I started a Twitter chat, after having participated in several. Ours is called @SportJobChat. The chat, using the hashtag #SportJC from the account @SportJobChat is aimed at students, educators and recruiters. We will be discussing career advice, internships, jobs & interviews, and related topics. We’ve already received support from Kristi Dosh, ESPN’s Sports Business reporter, as well as several recruiters and college professors. UMass Amherst and Lynn University’s Sport Management department, as well as over 10 other Sport Management programs have expressed interest in participating (and even adding it as a part of certain classes) as well. Our first chat on 3/12 had 89 participants throughout the hour long chat, with nearly 500 tweets. If you’d like to browse the content, feel free to check out http://search.tweetreports.com/q/topic/%23sportjc/id78275.html

If all goes as planned, this along with my other job hunt efforts will land me a job sometime relatively soon. If anyone reading this happens to have connections hiring for jobs in sport, social media or marketing, please let me know. My email is jonathanw at levitts dot net (did it like that to keep the spam down). Follow me on Twitter at @JWLevitt!

2012 marks the year I will be graduating from college. My 3.5 years at UMass have been some of the best of my life. I’ve met friends I want to stay close with for the rest of my life, had experiences in and out of the classroom that are second to none, and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the privilege of being in college. When I started as a freshman, I would never have imagined that I would start a baseball league, work for the Bruins, or be sending class projects to companies like Under Armour and Diageo (Captain Morgan’s parent company).

2012 marks the year I join the workforce, if everything goes as planned. My social media activity has been higher than ever, networking with anyone and everyone, participating in #JobHuntChat, #SBChat, and many more Twitter networking chats. I’m in the process of looking for jobs in social media, marketing or sales. Ideally I’ll find a position with a little bit of all three. I’ll be sure to update again as time goes on in regards to this. I’ve already had some good discussions with people about jobs, so ideally I’ll know what I’ll be doing before Spring Break.

With spring finally arriving, it’s time for us to begin our work on our baseball league. This will be the original group’s last year running the league, as we are all incoming seniors this fall. It’s so weird that our first three years of college are already over. As a result, we have been training our “replacements” so that they will be prepared to run the league as successfully as we were able to.

We are looking at adding on additional sponsors and possibly even taking charitable contributions from companies to financially support the league. As a way of providing added value to our players, we have paired with an Oakley reseller who’s able to give us discount prices since we’re buying many sunglasses. Additionally, we’re looking into partnering with a local bat company to be able to give one or two bats (at no additional cost) to each team, further increasing the value of every individuals’ registration fee. We’ll have more information on that as it develops.

We’ve been increasing our social media efforts as a way to increase awareness of the league, as well as improve value that we can offer our sponsors. The more followers/fans we have, the wider the audience we can reach. Through our Wiffle Madness Twitter experience (twitter.com/wifflemadness), we’ve learned that we can’t post things only related to the baseball league; we have to provide additional, interesting content that provides a reason for people to follow us (especially those not in the league), not just for game updates and such.

Look for us at www.twitter.com/buenoball and Facebook.com/umblonline!

Our wiffle ball tournament was a couple weeks ago. We raised $1000 for WillPower, and raised over $300 of that through generous donations from UMass Alumni in various sport organizations. The big ticket (pun intended) item was a pair of tickets to the Celtics vs. Heat game where Rondo came back from a dislocated elbow. Couldn’t have asked for a better game.

The tournament itself ran relatively smoothly, much better than we had expected for a first year tournament. We started about 15-20 minutes late as a result of a couple teams not showing up on time, but that was dealt with.

We had a couple live musical performances by UMass students, and we’ll have videos of that posted as soon as it’s edited. We’re also going to have 1 and 5 minute long promotional videos with highlights from the tournament.

Besides for getting exactly zero minutes of sleep the night before, the day of the tournament was fun. Everyone was enjoying themselves, and is looking forward to the next tournament already!

Normally, you might think that a long gap in the time between posts on a blog means that there wasn’t much going on. For us, that could not be any further from the truth. In several weeks time, we went from aiming for a 30-50 team tournament, to logistically only being able to have 15 teams (which almost wouldn’t be worth it) to potentially getting coverage on ESPNU for what we’re now aiming to be one of the biggest one day wiffle ball tournaments in the country.

Our belief in the success of this tournament has seemed to stay in line with that of mother nature. Right around that day that it was about 10 below zero, we nearly called off the tournament altogether because we thought we’d never be able to run a tournament in April judging by the ridiculous amount of snowfall we’ve received this winter. In time though, the days have gotten somewhat warmer (it is still February though so who knows, especially in New England), and our aspirations for this tournament have risen right with the Mercury.

Its looking like we’re going to have Red Bull as a sponsor, giving us mainly product sponsorship and a way to draw more people to an off campus event. On that note, we were able to confidently decide to run such a tournament 1.5 miles off campus as a result of an extensive market research campaign that we ran exclusively through the use of social media (Facebook & Twitter). We used Qualtronics, a market research tool to compile data on the willingness of people to participate in an on campus vs off campus (with data including if we can provide transportation, or if it would need to be dealt with by those interested in attending on their own). The data showed that if we were able to provide transportation, the difference on a 1-10 scale was only about a point, as opposed to if we couldn’t provide transportation (almost 3 points lower). The survey can be found at
https://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_b7KeaJAnC5SRFFG

We’ve been able to contact UMass alumni within the various pro sport organizations, with the intention of getting donations that we can use as raffle items and giveaways/prizes. We’ve received great support from former UMass students, as we had hoped. Thank you to anyone that may be reading this and has supported us.

We will be launching our WiffleDon website on March 1. More details to come on that when it launches. In other internet news, we have been pushing hard to gain followers on twitter.com/wiffledon, and using that to keep people informed of the location of our barnstorming efforts (more info on that to come below) and registration information, as well as fun facts every couple days.

We also started a Facebook fan page, facebook.com/wiffledon . Last Friday, we set up at Haigas Mall on campus and played wiffle ball for a couple hours, and gave out candy to people who Liked our page on Facebook. Additionally, we had some summer themed music playing for people to enjoy. It was a beautiful day out to play some wiffle ball, with temperatures reaching nearly 65. Several people stopped and played for a while with us! They were very excited for the tournament.

Everything on the tournament operations side is going smoothly; we’ve established a thread online to improve communication across all departments. I’d say its been successful so far.

That’s all we’ve got for now. Still looking for that Title Sponsor…

Today I met with the VP and President of UMASSM (University of Massachusetts Association of Student Sports Managers) about the club’s role with the wiffleball tournament. We decided that for the most part, club members will be in charge of tournament operations. Our next step was to determine how we were going to select members, which proved to be a tough concept. We decided that a formal interview with a resume wouldn’t be best, as it would pretty much eliminate people with no experience that still have great ideas (similar to our situation when we started the league, none of us really had much experience in the sport industry, as compared to now). After brainstorming for a significant amount of time, we decided what we’re going to do is email all of the members in the club a document containing our goals with the tournament, and what we’re looking for from club members.

Instead of interviewing people as the first step, we’re going to have people do some research on past tournaments across the country (specifically on college campuses) to determine what is necessary. We’re doing this for two reasons. I read Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People last year for my Leadership and Networking class, taught by none other than the owner of Bueno Y Sano himself (our title sponsor for the baseball league). From Part 3 of the book, there is a lesson about ownership of ideas. Carnegie writes that you should often “Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.” A result of doing this is that a person is often much more willing to work on a project if they feel like they came up with the idea. Yes, we’ve already identified many of the aspects of Tournament Operations that need to be fulfilled, but we may have missed a few. If the people applying for this position miss a few as well, that can easily be remedied.

The other benefit to this approach is that it gives us the opportunity to see what people can bring to the table. If they show the initiative to go ahead and get in touch with previous tournament directors and do some quality research and are able to compile a list of goals and necessities for our tournament, we can almost be certain that the applicant is someone we want on board with us. What we’re not looking for is someone to come back and say “All we need is a bunch of chairs, bats and balls.”

We’ve identified a number of aspects of T-Ops, including but not limited to event insurance (in case it rains), registration table and logistics related to that, vendors, contacting UMass Police about the expected crowd, contacting the UMass Physical Plant (trash, bathrooms, etc), scheduling, field layout, equipment needed and much more. These are the sort of things we will be looking for from people interested in working with us.

We’ve also contacted the Marketing Club to see if they’d be interested in helping with the marketing aspect of the tournament. They seem very interested so far, as it would be a great way for their members to gain some real world experience marketing an event taking place on campus.

Our next steps from here will be to draw up a marketing plan, complete with a SWOT analysis, determine sponsorship levels (names and amounts) and finalize roles, and bringing our additional team members up to speed.

I’ve attached the memo we’re sending around to the various clubs. The one attached is tailored to UMASSM, as they’ve been the first to act on this opportunity.

Seeking Club Support Memo

Something I forgot to add on my last post… I did some research a couple months ago and found an old wiffleball tournament that used to be run in a joint effort between the Sport department and the HTM department a number of years ago called Wiffle Your Way to Fenway. The winner of the tournament at UMass won the opportunity to play in a tournament at Fenway Park. One of the professors involved in the tournament is still at UMass, so we will be meeting with him after Thanksgiving Break to see if we can rekindle the collaboration with the Red Sox and UMass in hopes to bring back this tournament.

It has only been a few weeks since my last post, but we’ve accomplished SO much since then. Our All Star Game went well in the end, everyone that came out had a great time. Between then and now we had a few unfortunate rainouts, but we’ve concluded our second season successfully! We’re currently sending out a league satisfaction survey to our players.

On Saturday the committee met at Bertucci’s with Dr. Lachowetz to get the wheels spinning on our WillPower Wiffleball Tournament. From WillPowerFoundation.org, their mission is to: “provide financial support to local families and individuals with disabilities in Western Massachusetts when private insurance or other institutions do not.” We will be running two divisions in the tournament, a just for fun (more casual) style, and a competitive division. We’re looking at charging $10 for registration, similar to the Relay For Life, and encouraging people to raise money for WillPower similar to how the Relay For Life operates. There will be incentives for the most money raised, as well as for teams that reach a certain goal ($100? $250?).

Rich Goldstein, our Director of Special Events (currently interning for ESPN London) wrote up a very thorough agenda for our meeting, which set us in the right direction. We went through the agenda, addressing all of the ideas and steps. Our next step after the meeting was to talk with Dr. Mark McDonald, who runs SoccerFest at UMass. We spoke with him for a decent amount of time and learned a lot from Dr. McDonald’s experience with SoccerFest. While brainstorming ideas for sponsorship, we identified some potential companies that would fit well with our tournament. We’re going to contact Target and hope to sell them on the option to sponsor the strike zone that will be visible to everyone on the field of play (couldn’t think of a more perfect sponsor for a strike zone).

Dr. McDonald also told us about how SoccerFest has kept detailed logs from the past several years, and we’re going to begin doing the same thing. Once we decide everyone’s roles, we’ll go in and take a look at these binders in small groups to help us learn what has worked and what hasn’t with local businesses running a similar event.

Our next meeting is Friday. We will be picking roles, identifying potential sponsors that would be a good fit for our tournament, as well as determining various levels of sponsorship (on our shirts, strike zones, signage, title sponsor, etc).

I’ll post again after our next meeting.

The UMass Baseball League’s All Star Game and HR Derby is set for October 24th. Recently, a number of students from the Intro to Sport Management class applied and were interviewed for positions with the committee. So far, the group as a whole has been very impressive and motivated to succeed. I have been extremely happy with the results so far, as they have already surpassed my expectations. We may even have a Title Sponsor for our All Star Game/HR Derby as a result!

After our meeting on Friday, we established responsibilities and guidelines for each person on the committee, regarding their roles in planning the All Star Game. Something I’ve learned over the years from my father has been to hold people accountable for what they agree to do. To accomplish this, we set guidelines of dates when things were to be started and completed. I asked everyone to report back to the entire group (in our “thread” on Facebook) when someone completes something they’ve agreed to do. This helps to promote effectiveness and follow through, as it shows the contributions of each individual person, as well as showing that they have been true to their word and followed through on what each person said they will accomplish by a certain time.

More and more I am learning about how to delegate effectively. Still, I made sure to lay out what I was to be responsible for and when I was to finish each task, as several of my responsibilities affected when other people could start their jobs.

On another topic, we’ve recently added Jonathan’s Sports World of Hadley MA as our “Official Equipment Sponsor.” Located near the retail chain Dick’s Sporting Goods, Jonathan’s Sports World is a much more welcoming place to shop. The owner, Jonathan Levin-Epstein was more than happy to provide the league with 30% off all purchases. In return, we’ve been directing our players and fans to do business at Jonathan’s when looking to buy sports equipment.

For our All Star Game and HR Derby we will be having 20 of the league’s best players face off against each other. After the All Star Game, we will be having a HR Derby for another 10 players. In efforts to expand the visibility and awareness of the league, we’re having a competition among the teams to see who can bring the most fans. The winner will get some sort of team reward. At the field we will be having another free BBQ, as well as many giveaways.

I’ll blog again to give the full rundown on how the All Star Game goes!

This press release is being distributed to all local media outlets, written by Brendan Trelease.

At The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, intramural sports such as flag football, soccer, and even co-rec kickball are offered to students. But not too long ago if you were to look through a list of the intramural sports available there would have been one popular sport missing….baseball. So where did that leave the students who wanted to play baseball, but didn’t have the time to play Club or Varsity Baseball? Intramural Softball? No. Co-Rec Kickball? Not a chance. This absence of an intramural Baseball league forced a group of UMass students to take matters into their own hands. They decided to create their own league, built by baseball players…for baseball players.

But how do a bunch of thin pocketed college students go about funding a fully functional baseball league? The group’s search for funds brought them to one of Western Massachusett’s most well known restaurants, Bueno Y Sano.  “From day one, everything seemed to fall into place, like it was destined to happen or something. What began as a request for $25 or $50 turned into a sponsorship large enough for naming rights and the title sponsor for the league.” Recalls Jonathan Levitt, one of the league’s co-founders. And so begins Bueno Ball, the official UMass Baseball League. It didn’t take long for the league to start seeing success, before the start of this season the league has over 150 players and 10 teams. The league is run by Sport Management majors, who gain valuable experience in running the finances, marketing, and sponsorships for the league.

This year’s season is already bigger and better than last years, and its hype has attracted the attention of UMass Alum and current Boston Celtics Forward Tony Gaffney, who plans to throw out this year’s first pitch on Opening Day. To enjoy some good (free!) food and our national pastime come to The Bueno Ball 2010 Opening day at Amherst Middle School on September 12 at 12:15pm. The first games begin at 1:00 pm. For more information about the Bueno Ball League visit their Facebook page Facebook.com/BuenoBall or our website at http://www.umass.edu/rso/umassm/umbl/.