Meyers Leonard Gets a Surprise...

This is the best...

Meyers Leonard's brother, Bailey, returned from Afghanistan...Meyers did not know he was retruning and Bailey surprised him by showing up at the shootaround before the Michigan game on March 1.

Thank you Bailey for your service.

Full MiLB Sports Marketing Project

If you read my last post, and from the looks of it, no one did - I recently assigned my sports marketing classes a project where they needed to come up with the name of a Class A Chicago Cubs affiliate that was coming to our area. They needed to procure a sponsor for the stadium, name the team, create a logo and promote a press conference where they would reveal the aforementioned tasks.

Now that we are at the end of our unit they are building upon that base with the rest of their project. At this point, they have to:
1. Design home and away uniforms, as well as a cap
2. Create an Opening Day promotion for both adults and children. They need corporate sponsors for both promotions.
3. Create a local 30 second television commercial, design a billboard and choose four locations to put them around the city, and create a social media campaign as well.
4. Finally, thanks to Benjamin Hill at Ben's Biz Blog, they are creating a unique food item to sell at the stadium. It must be indigenous to the area, not already created/sold at another establishment, and be unique enough to draw fans on it's own accord. It can be a contest or just a grandiose item. The students will then build these food items in the FACS kitchen next week.

I'm pretty excited to see what I get. There were a couple of groups where I had to strongly suggest they go back and reconsider their team names and logos (I have a lot of comedians as students). Once the project is finished I will post results here.

Sports Marketing Project

Today I assigned the first part of a project for my sports marketing classes. The scenario at hand goes like this:

"Fishers, IN (city of our school) has approved a deal to build a baseball stadium near Hamilton Town Center (a shopping center two miled from our school) that will house the new Class A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs. Your team has been hired on as marketing consultants with the city and the Cubs to name the team, create the logo and to find sponsorship for the stadium."

The end game of this section of the project is for the students to have a press conference revealing the name of the team, the logo, and the stadium sponsor. They also need to create a newspaper ad promoting the press conference and a flyer to hang at Hamilton Town Center. The press conference needs to take place (figuratively) at a place near Hamilton Town Center.

I'm very interested to see what my students create in this project. So far, some of the names are pretty creative. I wish I could reveal the rest of the project...but I can't just in case I have some students check this blog. But it's pretty cool. :)

Liam Duddy

One of my former students, Liam Duddy, saw this blog and thought it was pretty cool. He also thought I should have a post about him. This is his post.

This is a picture of him playing football. He's alright. It's better if I put a picture of him on here with his helmet on, because without it....not to mean, but yikes.


The End.

Baseball TIme

Here is a uniform I designed for an assignment in Sports Marketing. I love baseball and found Ben Hill on Twitter. He is a blogger for MLB and reports on the minor leagues. He has a great job (yes, I'm jealous). One day I ran across this post on Pensacola getting a AA team and voting on a name. I took that and made it an assignment in Sports Marketing. My students drew one of the names and had to create uniforms, a mascot, and an Opening Night promotion. I was so humbled when Ben created an entire post about my assignment. You can see it here. Anyway, I gave the uniforms a shot too - I chose the Aviators. Here are my unis.

Home uni

Away Uni

Alternate Uni

Change is good...

Made some changes today. Decided to make the focus of this blog sports marketing, which is one of my passions. You will probably see a lot of uniform creations here because that is my current obsession. And without further adieu...

This is my first shot at a uniform set from my Sports Marketing class last year. I called the team Fire Ants and borrowed the logo from USC-Sumter.

Here are the uniforms. My students said I "stole" too much. So I created another set...

This is the Black Knights. Created logo all by my lonesome. The uniforms lean towards Oregon's football uni's. The helmet is supposed to be like the helmet Oregon used in the National Championship. The shoulders are supposed to look like diamond plate. Oregon had a faux-diamondplate look a few years ago. I kept the actual color of silver to make it look cooler.

Home uniforms. Created three sets: home with white pants, away with black pants and alternate with green pants.

A Change is Needed....

There has been some movement in the AQ Qualifying Conferences (Utah, TCU, etc..) I thought I would share my thoughts on a possible alternative to the BCS.

It can be viewed here:

Alternative to the BCS

View more presentations from illini3sc.

The Challenge

Last week I was in Cleveland, TN with the youth group from my church for a conference called CIY Move. It was an excellent conference with some amazing speakers. The main speaker was Jeff Walling and he was incredible. His message and delivery knocked me to my knees and I was moved (no pun intended). Many of the kids had some great spiritual challenges presented to them that week as well. I had a blast hanging out with the teenagers, in spite of the lack of sleep, :)

Anyway, the last day we were all handed what was called a Kingdom Worker card. It was a challenge to help us activate our faith after what we experienced at the conference. You could hand the card back and not take the challenge, but if you opened it you committed to accepting the challenge. In my zeal, not only to be a leader, but to help push me to show my faith, I instantly opened the card. Wow. If anyone doesn't think God has a sense of humor - well, you're not in my shoes, because I know he was laughing as I read my challenge card.

It said this (paraphrase) - You must drink only water (not bottled water) for the next year. Pray for the millions who do not have easy access to clean water. Use Active Water as a tool in your challenge."

Talk about hitting me where it hurts. I LOVE my sodas and G2. I hardly ever drink water. But I accepted the challenge and am going to do it. I am currently on Day 5 and so far it hasn't been too bad. Last night, I had a serious Coke jones. But I got through it and today is another day.

I'll keep you updated on my challenge and also keep you abreast of any fundraising I might do for ActiveWater during the year.

Here We Go Again....

Once again, in my sporadic nature, I am trying to get this blog going consistently. While I love Twitter (@illini3sc), it tends to abbreviate topics I'd like to elaborate on a little more. Hopefully I can find some consistency in this.....

For today, it's my annual MLB Predictions Post. Today is Opening Day (probably the greatest day of the year) and I need to put my picks down in print so that I can see how bad they turn out once the season is over. So, without further adieu:

American League
East - Boston Red Sox: offseason moves and better health this year is too much to deny
Central - Chicago White Sox: adding to Dunn to potent lineup with good staff wins it
West - Texas Rangers: A's are sexy pick, but don't trust their offense. Rangers can mash.
Wild Card - Tampa Bay Rays: Yes, I am not picking the Yankees. Rays have great pitching and added Damon and ManRam to lineup.
AL Champ - Chicago White Sox: Lefties will shut down AGon & Papi in playoffs.
C y Young - Justin Verlander
MVP - Josh Hamilton: lots of candidates, but I can't pick against my boy!

National League
East - Philadelphia Phillies: even with their injuries that rotation is too stacked to lose
Central - Milwaukee Brewers: Not buying Reds pitching and think Cards will be hurt by Wainright loss enough for Brewers to sneak up an win it. Greinke HUGE get by them.
West - San Francisco Giants: again, pitching. Oh yeah, that Posey kid is good too.
Wild Card - Colorado Rockies: the consensus is the Braves, but I'm holding off on them for another year.
NL Champ - Phillies: Who else? Great pitching beats great hitting in postseason.
Cy Young - Roy Halladay
MVP - Troy Tulowitzki

World Series Champs - Philles: read above about pitching. So, there you have it. Picks destined to go horribly wrong because I picked them. Let the brow beating begin!!