Sports Marketing is an introductory business course that teaches students marketing concepts and theories that apply to sporting events. The course is a semester long course that is offered at the CP and Honors Levels.
Timothy Lane, who is a teacher in the business department, explains how the Sports Marketing course was designed to try to capture students that have an interest in sports as well as entertainment. Lane also adds that this course is designed to show others how sports marketing has become such a large industry.
Despite only having four teachers in the Business department, Lane explains that they have been trying to offer more business courses that students may have the potential to follow in college. Lane states, “[it is] challenging to do that with only four teachers and a limited number of courses but this is [their] attempt to try to open up a marketing course for students that are interested.”
Lane explains that this class also began for students who want to be entrepreneurs and are thinking that they want to market a service or product someday. This class can give these students some exposure and an introduction to marketing principles.
What Lane is hoping for students to get out of the course is to learn the basic marketing principles and see how they can relate to those principals in society or in the different products or services that are marketed to them. He says, “[he is] hoping that [students] can see the connections with the celebrities and with the athletes that [they] follow” and how they market themselves. He hopes that looking at this connection will be meaningful to students when they look at the marketing principles behind it.
According to Lane, this class brings together a unique group of students. He adds that the variety of students from the different sports that they enjoy tends to lead to some “good” classroom discussions and it also exposes students to other sports and other celebrities and athletes that maybe they [had not] been aware.
Lane says he enjoys allowing students to see how powerful the marketing is for both the athletes with their brands and also how the teams market themselves as well.
This course consists of a number of projects and working with classmates to learn about the marketing concepts in hopes of applying them to current situations.
An example of these types of projects would be how students did an NFL project. Students were asked to market the NFL to males ages 12-18 and they had to come up with some concepts as to how they would do that and how they would get their target audience engaged with the sport.
The sports marketing class was designed to attract students that are interested in sports and entertainment and pursue their passion for sports to introduce the principles of marketing.
This course is currently being taught all year round as a half semester course and is a one period class. However, there are two offerings each semester.
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