Developing Future Sport Business Leaders in the NBA D-League
Students in my spring semester practicum course put academic preparation into practice by working with the Iowa Energy NBA Development League team on sport marketing and sales projects. The semester began with a trip to Des Moines to meet with Energy executives and experience a game. Jazmine Constantino, University of Iowa alumna and Energy Group Sales Manager, tasked the students with developing new theme nights that the team could consider adding to next season’s promotional calendar. Additionally, Jazmine challenged each student to work on their sales skills by selling at least 10 tickets to the team’s final game of the season.
The students and I spent the next two months on campus in Iowa City going through several stages of preparation. The first stage involved research and brainstorming. Research included such things as investigating creative promotions done by other sport teams, becoming familiar with what the Energy already do for promotions, and utilizing the Nielsen Scarborough sport marketing research database for demographic and other data on the Des Moines market that might help identify target audiences around which promotions could be developed.
Once each project team settled on a theme night concept, the next stage was to develop the recommendations. In this stage, the students did everything from reaching out to possible sponsors and group sales to creating schedules of events and entertainment. Each project team worked on building a theme night that could be implemented with little additional investigation or effort by the Energy.
Finally, each team prepared a 10-minute presentation and designed a deliverable containing all of the theme night details for the Energy. All of the effort paid off when we returned to Des Moines on April 1 to present to the Energy executives - the students nailed it! I was most proud of the level of consistency from start to finish. There were six project teams and seven total theme night recommendations, and all of them were realistic and well developed with built-in sales and sponsorships to generate revenue and reduce expenses. Feedback from the Energy executives was that each recommendation had the potential to be either fully or partially implemented. The execs selected their top choice, which ended up being a “Women in Sports” theme night designed to support, inspire, and celebrate young women in sports. And the class exceeded its sales goal: 25 students sold a total of 293 tickets for an average of more than 11 tickets per student!
Among the Energy executives judging the presentations were three Iowa alumni, including Jazmine, Madeline Pavlik, and Duke McCargar. It was a proud moment to see my former students on the other side of the conference table helping mentor current students with feedback on their recommendations.
Below are a few quotes from student reflection papers written at the conclusion of the course:
"This practicum allows students to learn hands on, and I think these are the courses at the University of Iowa that are key to truly grasping the roles that we will take on in our future endeavors as professionals within the sports industry."
"Not many students in college can get this experience before entering the workforce, which gives students at the University of Iowa who do these practicums an advantage when applying for jobs. During all my interviews I am asked about these practicum experiences, and it is easy for me to talk about them."
"Unlike regular class projects where we work on fictitious projects and only get feedback from our professors, this experience allowed us the chance to create something that actually has the chance to be implemented. This aspect made it way more motivating to put in full effort because my team and I really wanted to impress Jazmine, Kyle, Duke and the other Energy executives. The work we did was very similar, if not exactly the type of work we would be doing if we worked for the Energy."
You can see some of the fun experiences our class had during trips to Des Moines, such as facility tours, helping out with promotions, and climbing into the stadium rafters to drop prize parachutes, in this brief video. Students got a taste of what running a game night in pro sports is really like. Thanks to the entire Iowa Energy organization, especially Jazmine and Kyle Davy, Chief Revenue Officer, for this partnership that is instrumental in helping develop the next generation of sport industry executives!
Enjoy the video!