During my time working in this class, it’s been an eye-opening and extremely enjoyable time to see the behind-the-scenes of what it’s like looking at the sports industry from the eyes of a marketing or communications head. What used to seem very straightforward turned into an interesting take. An example that we have done referring to this was the group activity where we would try and become PR management to do damage control for a situation that would make either side of a very important audience extremely angry. This exercise was interesting as well as being a headache. This made me immediately relate to the actual PR team who had to think of a quick solution to this issue.

But one of our main projects was to work with the ODU’s Esports team to give more shine on what they are doing wrong in order to give them a bigger audience.

Since I work there it was interesting and a bit humorous to work with them on both fronts. Both look from inwards as well as outwards. Our first assignment was to get feedback from their community. Because of the advantage of working in the arena, I was able to monitor people while we worked and gather information. But with the bonus of knowing a good amount of people who worked in the arena so I could easily go up and ask them for a quick interview. Most interviews played off like a regular conversation so I didn’t have to make them feel nervous to answer something suddenly. For those who I asked casually I put their responses in a statistic more than a written out and detailed version of the responses. But of course, we need a few actual responses to gain attention so I gathered a few friends for an actual interview. A few of them used to work at the arena so it was good to get responses from Ex-workers. I did wish that we got more information. But due to the poor timing and bad luck of my group mates, I was the main contributor of information.

In comparison with the other few groups, we were the weakest link due to our presentation that was starved of the creativity, information, and style of presenting that the other groups had. We could have worked on it a bit more.

The second one was a bit better to work with my group. We had the task of event planning. Again, I used my previous knowledge of what some people wanted to do and plan for the arena and made that a point of interest for us to flesh out a plan. We took reference to the placement of everything happening and where people would need to rest. This was to make sure that the area was not overflooded with people wanting to fight against a player. It makes it nice and organized for others. Also, having multiple divisions opens the gates for others to try and practice. And finally, for the players who did not want to fight but instead wanted to do something to advance, they could ask the players for information. This part was mainly for players who wanted to do more with their time as a player rather than to be a face on a screen. We also gave them information about gifts, times, scheduling, theme, and how they should record it. This was to give them the most bang for their audience but also a good amount of content for them to use later.

All and all this was a very fun class that I will be very interested in recommending to other people.