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Priming the Pump

November 28, 2014

Today and tomorrow bring an end to the MHSAA’s fall tournament season that, overall, experienced the worst weather I’ve witnessed in my 29 years of watching our fall events. We are grateful to those hearty fans who followed their favorites through wind, rain, ice and snow.

The MHSAA’s “bread and butter” is its season-ending tournaments. Try as we might to diversify our revenue, all our non-tournament revenue sources combined continue to account for less than 15¢ of every $1 the MHSAA generates. Sponsorships, broadcast rights fees and officials registration fees make a contribution to our enterprise; but the MHSAA operates without membership dues, fines and tournament entry fees.

That leaves gate receipts (ticket sales) as the largest (by far!) source of revenue; and it’s the football and basketball tournaments that pay the way for the many tournaments that the MHSAA operates at a financial loss (we call it an investment).

Because of this narrow flow of revenue, I asked a team of MHSAA staff to take a comprehensive look at the MHSAA’s marketing of its tournaments. Over a series of energetic meetings, these imaginative staff members have compiled a list of ideas to promote MHSAA tournaments by better using existing means and opening up new avenues to generate interest and increase spectator support.

The MHSAA Representative Council will soon vet and vote on a wide variety of ideas generated by our in-house task force. The objectives are a growing customer base enjoying an improved customer experience.

Innovation Obstacles

April 12, 2013

It doesn’t take long to compile a dozen or more examples of products or businesses that have disappeared, or nearly so, because the world changed while the product or business did not.

Think eight-track tapes and players.  Consider what digital photography has done, from the Eastman Kodak Company to out-of-business local studios.  What the Internet has done to travel agents.  See what’s happened and still happening to print newspapers across the country, to magazines, and to both local and large chain bookstores.

It is not at all rare that businesses fail to reinvent themselves.  For many reasons, including admirable passion for what they are doing, business leaders often miss the trends or ignore the signs that suggest the need to change their products or their entire business model.

As Geoff Colvin wrote in FORTUNE magazine Feb. 25, 2013, “Business model innovation is a competency that doesn’t exist in most companies.”  He continued:  “The largest obstacles will be weak imaginations, threatened interests, and culture.”

I suspect that those are also the three major obstacles we must overcome as we think about the future of interscholastic athletics.

  • Does school-based sports, with a 100-year-old history, have a 50 or even 15 year future in schools and society?

  • If so, should the business model change?  And if so, how?

I suspect that some of what we think is change may be no better than rotating bald tires on our car; when what we really need is new tires, or no tires at all.