Sure, the competition and the games are the vehicle; highlights drive reach and engagement, the best in the world at their sport putting on a show.
But the modern-day nature of social media allows for more. Modern-day fandom demands more. It’s not enough to just cheer on laundry and stitched-on jersey numbers. When you feel like you know the athletes, then it’s not just watching elite athletes compete live; it’s more akin to watching a friend or family member do their thing. The power of parasocial relationships in action.
The most successful leagues, teams, and athletes are working to develop such relationships with fans; there’s a premium added to every game and play when fans are cheering on players who feel like friends. Paige Y. Price, MPS is among the wave of team social media creators charged with not just promoting ticket sales and driving engagement, but fostering such meaningful connections between players and fans. Working with the Washington Spirit of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), Price has seen simple and playful bits like asking Spirit players a ‘question of the day’ upon their arrival, playing rock-paper-scissors, or autographing photos of themselves as young kids drive the kind of engagement that transcends performance on the pitch. For Price, it requires a thoughtful and open approach with players.
“I always told them, you never have to answer the question for me. Like, if you don’t want to, if you don’t feel comfortable doing it, you don’t have to, because I know there’s a select group of girls that I can always count on that will,” said Price, who has been in her role with the Washington Spirit since early 2024 (her second stint with the team). “Obviously, they didn’t know me at the time, so they were a little — not hesitant but just kind of aware that I’m a new person — and feeling me out, I’m feeling them out, too. And I took my surveys from that, and then also my mental surveys from that, and as I got to know them. And I did have a lot of help from Amie and Cecily (from social media production company Hat Trip, which works with the NWSL), who hired me, just letting me in on certain player personalities.
“But it’s also reading body language and reading the room…[Also], I think trying to get to know them outside of soccer, like if we have just the slightest bit of anything in common…trying to have those small things in common that can help me engage in conversation with them that doesn’t involve work for either of us; I think that was huge as well…”
Building such relationships and producing group participation-style content helps every player (who wants to) get some screen time and a chance for fans to get to know them. But the Spirit also happen to have arguably the most well-known individual women’s soccer player in the world, Trinity Rodman, on their roster, and she was at the center of one of the biggest sports stories in the world earlier this year.
Having a collaborative, friendly relationship with players pays off in the day-to-day and certainly in the big moments. So when Rodman signed her new deal to remain in the NWSL with the Spirit, enabled by a rule change by the league that helped the Spirit approach the money she’d have on the table with European clubs, the effort to roll out a meaningful announcement to match the moment involved teamwork. The result was an authentic, effective, well-thought-out series of posts and productions that met the moment.
“Trinity was pretty hands-on in the content creation,” said Price, who also described the posting plan for her, Trinity, and the team, planned with precision. “A lot of it was her vision; [for] the video that she posted on her channel before we went live with our video, she was sending edits back and forth and was like, ‘This is the kind of feel that I want it to have.’ So it was a lot of fan interaction because we know that she spends a lot of time interacting with fans after games. That’s how she wanted it to look. And we were able to deliver.”
A lot of the Spirit’s best-performing content includes Trinity Rodman (shocker, I know!). But while including Rodman in every post and video may juice engagement, Price told me she’s cognizant of ensuring fans get to know every player on the team. Every player has a chance to be someone’s favorite player. This is a challenge every team faces, amplified by national media and marketing campaigns that often center around just a few star players.
Including players beyond Spirit stars like Rodman and Croix Bethune, among others, is no act of charity, however — it’s smart strategy. Sports leagues are so diverse nowadays, and the NWSL is no exception, boasting some of the best players in the world from countries around the world. Diversifying players in content helps diversify the appeal for fans, giving new and casual fans more avenues toward avidity. Price explained her thought process around varying the players who feature in the team’s content.
“If there’s a player that I’m looking through our feed and I’m like, we haven’t really seen them in a little bit, let me do something. The question of the day is our big thing for that,” she said. “You get to see everybody, and you get to hear from everybody, so I really like to do questions of the day for that purpose…Especially because we have international players. I don’t speak Spanish super well, but yeah, I never want anybody to feel excluded, so I always offer it up.
“And when I notice that we’re getting a little heavy [on certain players]… there are other people on our team that are like, oh, we haven’t posted this person in a while, let’s give them a little shout, let’s put them first in this carousel of photos, instead of either not including them or putting them at the back and putting Trinity in the front. Because, as special and as wonderful as Trinity is, we have other players on the team, and she knows that and she respects that. And, she has said, she loves her team so much, and we love the team as well. And we want to highlight the entire team, not just our star girls.”
There’s something else that’s been happening with Price and the Spirit, as well as her counterparts at other teams throughout sports, which greatly enhances that sense of relatability for fans with the players — Price herself is a minor character in the content. When the athletes play rock-paper-scissors, it’s Price’s hand they’re playing against. When players answer the question of the day, they’re often speaking to her, not staring into the abyss of a camera lens. There was even a viral video produced by the Spirit in 2025, where players who knew Price’s name got a piece of candy (over 202,000 likes on TikTok).
The ‘admin’ is a proxy for the fans, a vehicle through which fans get to interact with the players. Price recognizes the role she plays and the evolving opportunity for admins like her to enhance the storytelling and relationship building in the team’s content.
“For the most part, I have just been behind the camera, and I think, even though it was only two years ago and it’s still pretty recent, that’s what being an admin has been,” said Price. “But I have since seen a lot of different clubs and organizations have that frontward-facing social media personality, FC Barcelona being one of them. Their [version of] me, basically, does often turn the camera around and [says] like, ‘Hey guys, this is us at our Champions League game, and we’re here in Italy, and this is a really big game for us, so excited to walk you through it.’ Something like that.
“So that is something that I have thought about…I’m definitely cognizant about my voice and what my hands look like and how I’m presenting to our fans.”
We relate to people more than brands. That is unquestionable, and why it’s so essential to drive connections with athletes. And, at the same time, that’s also why humanizing the ‘admin’ makes so much sense. It’s not some faceless corporate logo behind the camera, engaging in the comments, and interacting with the players — it’s a person, a stand-in for the brand, and an opportuntiy for fans to form a more organic parasocial relationship.
It’s those relationships that drive fandom as much as anything that happens in the game. The organizations that embrace that aspect will be the ones that succeed going forward. The days of cheering for laundry aren’t gone, but there are generations of fans that need something more. Their love is harder-earned, but even more visceral, more lasting, and more powerful than any logo can hope to capture.
The word ‘fan’ is thrown around far too liberally nowadays.
Sports, entertainers, creators, influencers, everyday individuals — they can all regularly reach and engage millions of people every day. However, not every person who consumes, watches, engages, and even shares or saves is a fan. Likewise, not every person who attends a game or show is a fan. Your favorite team’s biggest fan may never attend a game or watch a game, but their closest is full of team swag and merch. That is, if a team is even the focal point of their sports fandom in the first place.
Developing true fans (remember, fan is short for fanatic) requires something more than exposure. Fandom is a journey, and it can manifest in diverse ways. As more brands and properties emerge with dreams of building their own fan base, there’s an increasing diversity of pathways to fandom and definitions of it.
Alyssa Meyers encounters a variety of strategies and tactics to create fans, engage them, activate within fandom, and identify new forms of fandom that are worth paying attention to and exploiting. A senior reporter for Marketing Brew, one of Meyers’s main beats is sports, a broad look at the business of sports and sports-adjacent brands and properties, how they market, how partners participate, how fans engage, and the trends and tactics that play out in this dynamic space. She told me about the avenues to fandom she’s been seeing in her conversations and reporting, as countless leagues and properties seek to earn their spot in the zeitgeist and the fan base that can come from that.
“I hear a lot about [the ‘next gen fan’], see a lot about that, and write a lot about that. I think it’s smart. I’ve been seeing it a ton, especially lately in motorsports,” said Meyers, who picked up the sports business beat only after joining Marketing Brew. “I think after what happened with Formula One in the US, even F1 and teams are still, I think, focused on, Okay, we have this new audience. They’re young, they’re women, they’re from parts of the world that we have not reached before. They’re here, they’re interested. How can we make them a fan of our team? How can we make sure that they will wake up at eight in the morning to watch a race in Abu Dhabi, as opposed to just watching Drive to Survive?…
“Fandom starts so young,” she said, elaborating on the focus to develop young fans. “People say this to me all the time in conversation. I think the sports marketers that are really knowledgeable about this do say things along the lines of, We’ve done studies, we know fandom starts when you’re three, four, five years old, super young, so why would we not think about a fan’s journey from that young age?”
In some ways, it’s never been easier to cultivate fans, with sports intersecting with so many parts of culture. In other ways, however, the competition for fans’ attention, hearts, and minds has never been greater, with fewer barriers to entry and massive audiences up for grabs every day. The result is more creativity and innovation in sports marketing tactics, from collaborations across verticals, unique merch, and even mascots making moves. Meyers described a bit of what she’s been seeing and reporting about, including her personal experiences as a fan.
“I’m so excited about what brands and teams and leagues are doing with mascots lately,” said Meyers, who told me about some of the fun activations with Ellie, the New York Liberty’s feminine elephant mascot. “That has been such a fun story for me to follow, because I do think that brands can play a role in developing the profile of a more rising team or league or sport. There’ve been some really cool campaigns with mascots, and I think that’s so fun.
“Partnerships with musicians, fashion collabs, I think, have been really cool, the NFL’s new partnership with Abercrombie this season.” Meyers also noted. ” It’s been amazing to see merch across the board get a little bit cooler, more stylish. I don’t just have to wear some big jersey that’s not made for a woman. I can spend money on a really cool jacket from my favorite team, or something like that. There’s just so much exciting stuff going on.”
The strategies playing out with various collaborations are the tip of the spear for fan development, very much integral in generating awareness, consideration, and conversion of new fans. And this is where that definition of fandom expands, with a growing number of devotees who may know little about the actual games, let alone the X’s and O’s, but still adopt something of the brand, the team, the athlete, the sport, into their identity. There are fans entering by association, too, who become true fans because an influencer or celebrity with whom they have a parasocial relationship is a fan — it’s a way to feel closer to the community and other fans; fandom by proxy.
Meyers spoke about the brand and influencer relationships, and how there are ‘new types’ of fans developing.
“I think brands do play a role, like doing innovative brand partnerships with big name companies that have an audience, even if it’s not fandom of like a sport. But I think there’s something to be said for that,” said Meyers, whose coverage goes well beyond mainstream sports to even fitness competitions like Hyrox. “I think some of the more lifestyle, entertainment partnerships are really cool.
“In the influencer vein, you think of music — there are creators in the music space, creators in the fashion space, creators in the food space — I’ve seen a lot of teams invite those people outside of sports, invite them in, have them come to a game, they do content that now their followers, who maybe only care about fashion, now they’re saying like, Oh, cool; like, we can go to this game and wear this merch. And it’s a whole new type of fan that you’ve unlocked. I think that a lot of organizations have had a lot of success going that route with something a little more unexpected, whether it’s a brand partner, an influencer partner, whoever, just branching out and getting new fans that way.”
Even some of the longstanding avenues to fandom are fading in importance in modern times, too. The primary motivation for fandom was originally local pride. You cheered for the local team, went to the games, watched the local broadcasts (those were often the only games you could watch), fell in love with the athletes, and then fell in love with new athletes as the roster changed over time. But now, outside of the limitation of regularly seeing the athletes and team IRL, there is no friction with being a fan of a team even a continent away, or an athlete, regardless of which team they’re on at the time.
This new reality has created new forms and categories for fandom, and new opportunities for sports properties to explore, Meyers explained.
“I think it’s incredibly feasible [to drive fandom outside of the region] for so many reasons,” she said. “I mean, look at the Premier League, look at how many Man City fans live in the US. I think there are some stats [that say] like 90% of Man City fans don’t live in the UK. You do not have to have that tie. I think the Premier League is an amazing example of that.
Meyers continued: “We already talked about how important connections with athletes are. In this day and age, you can build a team brand and have people root for your team just based on athletes, not based on the city. It’s sort of like the Athletes Unlimited model as well. They are another one that’s kind of doing this…
“I have come into sports fandom in so many different ways. And sometimes you have to pick a team; everyone isn’t going to grow up born into fandom. You don’t always pick a team based on where you live. People move around. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said about building a brand for a sports team that isn’t solely tied to the market or, geographically speaking…Everything is streamed; you could watch whatever team from whatever city.”
It’s not just the aspects of allegiance that are affecting how fandom is formed and manifests. The nature of consumption and engagement is evolving, too. There is no single funnel for sports marketers to work within anymore. The right funnel for every fan doesn’t lead to buying tickets or tuning into live games, necessarily. Particularly as teams and leagues seek to cultivate fans all over the world, they’ve had to adjust their definitions of fandom, aligning with modern fan traits and behaviors. Meyers described some of the ways sports properties are adapting to the emerging ways that fans are formed and want to engage.
“They’re clipping and putting value behind highlights and saying, Okay, people maybe don’t want to watch the whole game,” she said. “Maybe they can’t because they’re in a different time zone. That’s perfectly fine. We’re going to post a ton of highlights. If you only want to watch the highlights, that’s okay. That’s valuable. If you convert into buying a ticket or watching live from that, amazing. But if you don’t want to do that, that’s okay I think is the approach that a lot of marketers are taking, and I think the business case for it is integral.
“I think a lot of women’s soccer, when I think about the business of international sport, because I’m a fan, but also that’s a big conversation in terms of the player talent right now is, US stars that are based here, they can get paid a lot more money if they go play in the UK. and some of the biggest stars are. There are big disputes over their contracts now to keep them in the NWSL and vice versa. There are international superstars who are huge in their countries and on their national teams. Barbra Banda, Marta, like all these people who play in the NWSL. So you have to [develop fans internationally], and the league can monetize its fans in other countries. You just have to, because of that baseline reason that the talent is crossing countries more and more.”
Fan segments are increasingly diverse and complex. The motivations for fandom and pathways leading to one’s loyalty and expression of identity are more varied. The business strategies, in turn, are necessarily evolving to meet the new paradigms, reimagining sports marketing and embracing the cross-cultural nature of sports fandom today. But don’t mistake exposure for engagement, and don’t label engagement as devotion. Fandom is more than just a passing fad or a stop of the scroll; it’s about capturing a part of someone’s heart and mind.
The view from a sports team’s social media seat offers a unique perspective. Social touches just about everything. The person at the helm of the social media practice needs to know everything going on with the team, by necessity. From gameday presentations to sponsor activations, community events, and fan development initiatives, ticket promotions, and team transactions — the list goes on. Meanwhile, social has more fan touchpoints than any other part of the organization, is their finger on the pulse of an admittedly small but mighty sample of the fan base, and has a better picture of fans’ psychographics than perhaps any other department or person within the team.
From his early days managing social media with the Carolina Panthers, Dan LaTorraca appreciated the unique position that social media occupied and the diverse ways it could provide value. He eventually ascended to a role overseeing marketing with the Carolina Hurricanes, taking lessons from years of experience to help in building an industry-leading organization at the Canes. Today, he leads marketing at media measurement and tracking platform Zoomph, where he uses learnings from nearly two decades in sports business to continue to help push the industry forward.
I recently sat down with LaTorraca for a wide-ranging interview, packed with insights and anecdotes from throughout his career. Read on for just a few of the key points touched on in our chat. There is so much more in the full interview, and I highly recommend watching or listening! Check it out here
Social Media Is Part of the Larger Organization
It’s easy to become a little myopic in any job function or role. The social media operation wants to nail its KPIs and surpass them, hitting highs in metrics like views, impressions, reach, and engagement rate. But social media is ultimately one cog, an important and arguably the most front-facing cog, of the team and its business. The power of social media lies in its connectivity to every organizational goal, and therefore its ability to play offense, finding opportunities to capitalize on and problems to solve.
LaTorraca talked about his understanding of the pivotal position in which social media sat, and the mindset of weaponizing it, in a good way, to affect the bottom line, while maintaining and developing the long-term brand and connection with fans essential to any sports team.
“Social obviously was a powerful tool for engagement, for revenue driving, but also it’s like, Well, how are we driving [website] traffic with it? How are we driving leads with it? How is it feeding these other pieces here? How does the mobile app fit in with all this other stuff? How does email fit in? Ultimately, it wasn’t just about social; it was about building a strong digital ecosystem. And social may be the most valuable, impactful, and engaging part of that, especially in that era when everything was social…Social has been that front door, that front porch for teams in a lot of ways, so a lot of the resources and strategy started there, but it had to fit together with everything else, and to ultimately drive value and figure out where those value opportunities are.
“In the Panthers’ case, they were doing really well with ticket sales. They didn’t have a lot [of tickets] to offer because of the PSL [personal seat license] system they had there. So it was like, where are we going to make money elsewhere? Where are we going to drive value elsewhere? And is it with driving tune in for our broadcast network? Is it with retail and merchandise sales? Sponsorship integration ended up being the biggest piece for us. So, really having that perspective of, we have to see how this fits together with everything else, and also understand compromise. A lot of times it’s tough, and it was tough for me at first, too; it was almost like, you have to maintain the purity of social. Like, there’s a way to do this, and we can’t have other departments influencing or implementing our strategy and decision making here with another ticket deal or this or that. But I realized early on that, while it is an important marketing tool, it has to fit within the boundaries and the needs and goals of the organization.”
Developing a Voice and Brand That Draw Fans In
When LaTorraca was early in his tenure with the Panthers, the concept of a team with personality was just emerging in sports social media. But he knew that developing intimate relationships with fans was going to be the most effective way to punch above their weight in the Carolina and national sports hierarchy.
“The first thing that I picked up on was just like answering fans a lot more. Remember Zappos? That was one of the focal points of their social strategy was that they actually responded. We were still in an era in 2011 or so where if a brand responded to you on social, you were like, Alright, it’s either an automated customer service thing or it’s a mistake. The responses didn’t have personality or uniqueness. And you know, where we are now, it’s like, Oh man, this brand actually cursed at me. So we’ve evolved a whole lot. But back then, it was new, and that was something the Panthers could do differently.
“So building those 1-to-1 relationships, and I even kept a list of, like, certain things fans were passionate about, and we built authentic relationships there. I think that really helped us not only understand what mattered to them, but also the language they were using and how to craft and build our content strategy. So it was a mix of best practices and understanding what worked and what didn’t, and what we liked and what we were capable of, as well as what was going to resonate with our fans. We didn’t have the creative resources, we didn’t have a lot of other stuff that other teams had, but we were able to at least strategize our way into driving value both internally and externally.”
But, especially during a time when you’re trying to transform the strategy, you have to be able to show why this shift, this personality pivot, is working. Some things are immediately and easily measurable, some aren’t. But LaTorraca sought to prove why and how things were working and resonating. Those transformative moves can have compound effects, too, increasing fan avidity and evangelism, strengthening identities, and creating a fan base whole that’s greater than the sum of its individuals.
“Certain things like those 1-to-1 interactions aren’t measurable; technically, Zoomph can track those, and you can actually see social value if some kind of response actually catches fire. There is a way, but there’s so much more in those particular instances of measuring the sentiment. It’s not measurable in the traditional sense…
“However, the social voice was a key there, and that was something we were able to have data on that I used to validate the direction we wanted to go…This was at the time when you had the LA Kings starting to show a little more personality on social. I started seeing that and I was like, ‘This is what we need to be doing.’ We tried it in the comments a whole lot, and that was the way to test it. But we would occasionally put stuff out there that I felt was more human and had a bit more personality and sass and spunk to it. And what I would do is track the data and performance of that one and start kind of planting those seeds with my boss and his boss and ultimately their boss, who is the owner of, like, Look, this is working and this performs better than the average post, and clearly this type of of language and messaging and approach is resonating with our fans.
“I think it was built on those 1-to-1interactions, warming people up, and then eventually having actual personality and catching people off guard with some of the stuff that we put out there is going to be really good for growing our brand, engaging our fans, creating pride and sentiment there, and we backed it up with data. We were able to show, like, Hey, this is working, and get that buy-in to the point where in 2014 or so, we started having a lot more personality, and then I was able to share a lot more data. Then, 2015 was the Panthers’ Super Bowl season, and that’s when the gloves came off because it was where the team won 15 or 16 games in a row in the regular season, and a lot of people were doubting the team. And they were upset with Cam Newton for dancing in the end zone, and it was a lot of like, Oh, you guys are good, you’re probably the worst 10-0 team though, and everything was just ripe for me to dunk on on social. Almost like every week, we had something else that would go viral, because nothing galvanizes a fan base like when you’re successful, the team is good, the players are good, you’re winning, and the media or other narratives are coming at you. It puts a chip on the shoulder.”
The Value of Fandom
In its most fully developed state, sports fandom seeps deeply into hearts and minds, and it’s contagious throughout a snowballing mass that grows stronger with each addition and display. The strength, appeal, and spread of a brand create immeasurable value in ways both tangible and intangible. It all leads to arrows and trendlines pointing up, making every activation and strategy that much more meaningful and effective. It’s not always easy to measure linearly, because fandom drives success exponentially.
“I firmly believe that sports fandom can be boiled down to a desire for connection and community, and it’s fueled by identity. Those three pillars, to me, are the things that you have to engage in some way, because that’s what we are at the core of our identity or our kind of essence of sports fandom and sports consumerism. And I think finding ways to engage and leverage those, or build some brand pillars that help kind of convey those…In the Canes case, we defined it as fun, bold, and regional, but those were still lenses we could operate through. Like, regional is a great one, because we can talk about local community engagement and building a Canes bar network, or authentic brand positioning campaigns that were like murals or things like that. So, ultimately, the essence of those things, it’s not directly measurable in a traditional sense; it can be in a bunch of different ways of like, alright, how do we attribute this to that? But if you’re seeing certain things in your tracking, how retail sales of certain items are going up and trying to understand the psychology behind that, or certain types of social content or campaign or messaging or email pieces or other activations, whatever it may be, events or or ticket offers or promotional theme nights — all that stuff is measurable in a sense, but you have to also be able to tie it back to that human element in order to kind of have both sides there. You got to have the tactics you can measure, the activations you can measure and then refine and optimize, and you got to have well, this is how we tie it back to affinity or passion or community or belonging, or these other less tangible and measurable things that are really at the core and essence of what it means to be a sports fan…
“We had all these little ways we were going to try to get [the Canes] logo out there authentically. And it was like, alright, high-quality decals in every online order from our e-commerce shop and working with local businesses to distribute flags and all these little ways to influence the visual positioning of our brand, because that creates more passion. People see that and they say, I want to be part of that, or that’s something, or they’re already a fan, they’re like, I love that. This is that piece of their identity hanging on a flag outside their local bar, and that’s an important piece there. Well, yeah, it’s not as measurable, but it’s so important for growing a brand and creating that sense of pride and that regional sort of connection there, that sports really is.”
Making Big Moments Bigger
Sports are unpredictably predictable. There is a whole lot you can plan for (more on that in the next section), and a whole lot of extemporaneous opportunities that’ll present high ceilings of upside, even if you can’t foresee the details. It’s part art, part science, to enlist a well-worn but apt cliche, and a social media sixth sense of sorts to spot an opportunity to seize — provided the preparation and systems are in place to make seizing said opportunity possible in the first place. LaTorraca recounted one of the many examples of the Canes being ready to execute when an unexpected moment struck (and this excerpt doesn’t even capture all the ways the Canes capitalized):
“The last big piece we had with Twitter Amplify was the David Ayres game, which I’m sure you remember, was the emergency backup goalie comes in for an extended period, not just a couple of seconds, and essentially wins the game against the Maple Leafs on Hockey Night in Canada. And he was the team Zamboni driver. It was this whole wild story. And that video, I remember texting our video producer at the time and was like, Dude, you glue yourself to him, get as much as you can, because we didn’t have video people traveling prior to my first season there. But [revenue via] Twitter Amplify helped me make the case of being like, look at all the money we’re making, we need more video. Thank God somebody was there, and it wasn’t just a PR person with their cell phone getting something. We had one of our best video producers there, and he got some iconic footage that was later used in ESPN commercials and all sorts of stuff. But that one video where, if anybody listening goes and Googles David Ayres, of him walking into the locker room after the game, and all the Canes players are spraying him with water and all that, that one video made like $80,000 for us, and it was insane.”
Building and Activating a Well-Oiled Machine
Just like some of the best athletes make impressive plays look easy, some of the sports organizations make agile execution look smooth, too — like they had it planned all along. Both the athlete and the team can make it look easy because they’ve prepared and planned. They’ve been proactive in setting up the systems that need to operate together when the moment comes and have plans ready to go for every scenario, many of which can be anticipated, to whatever degree of precision. One of the most memorable initiatives from LaTorraca’s time with the Canes was when well-known hockey commentator in Canada, Don Cherry, called the Canes ‘A bunch of jerks.’ And the rest is history, as that line was molded into a revenue stream and a galvanizing force for Canes fans everywhere. LaTorraca explained how executing around that campaign and initiative was just one example of the importance of ‘proactive planning.’
“Creating a culture that prioritizes that proactive planning really is the key to being able to have the runway to capitalize when crazy stuff happens. And it always does. Lightning struck us two times in a year at the Canes, and that was great, and then it didn’t strike the same way for a while. But we had that Bunch of Jerks thing, and we were able to capitalize on it and build a shirt. And people are important, too; we had the right relationships. I can still remember sitting in my office after that game, after we sort of concocted this plan, and Mike Foreman is texting Don Waddell and Tom [Dundon], being like, Hey, we’ve talked, we’re making shirts about this. You know, like, I pitched this idea to him and I was like, we can use this company here, because at the time, Breaking T was just kind of getting big, and I was like, I think they can turn it around for us quickly, because I don’t want to wait here for this one. It was also President’s Day weekend, and a lot of other shirt distributors were closed. Mike got the approval and basically was like, Alright, if Dan can show what a shirt model will look like by the next morning, we’ll go…
“If you give yourself more time, it just leads to so much more opportunity for creativity and doing stuff that’s a higher quality. Whether it is planning out the promotional giveaway item or a Star Wars night idea. Our Whalers night is another great example of like, Hey, you really want to plan that out, that was a Super Bowl for us, in a way, to capitalize on that, whether it was retail or activation, it was a a chance for our creative team to flex, and you want to be able to plan that out far away in advance…Whatever you can do, give yourself the runway to do it for the things you can control. It goes back to what I tell my kids all the time, You can’t control what’s going to happen to you, but you can control how you react. And if you have the right system in place and process in place and plan and people and all that, and you can come up with the right ideas and creative solutions, you can really turn a tough situation into a win, or you can turn a win into a bigger win, but you gotta have a lot of things in place to do it. It doesn’t just happen like that, and if you don’t have the runway to do it, it’s not going to happen. So that’s what really separates the good from the great is those cultures that prioritize people first above all else, but process and proactive planning, and that’s how you really win time and time again when these things happen. Because they always will. It might not be as big as every other situation, but even capitalizing on the smaller ones can still drive value in the end.”
There are plenty of definitions, and no shortage of software tools and measurement businesses to answer that question. But, for the consumers — the actual sports fans — there is a bit of you know it when you see it. Part of it is longevity, with brand-sport associations that have been together so long, it feels like they go together like peanut butter and jelly. The activations aren’t interruptive but additive or complementary.
For the brands, they’re getting the proverbial bang for their buck. But that ‘bang for the buck’ can mean a lot of things, as anyone who has worked on the brand or property side can attest. The roots of sports sponsorships may have been outfield signs and facsimiles of newspaper ads, but the options are more varied and solution-oriented in modern times.
For the teams and leagues, it’s more than just a paycheck. The revenue is key, to be sure, but other elements come into play — brand associations that can elevate their own, better experiences and content for their fans supported by willing partners, and putting their stamp of approval or endorsement on products and services that help them and can help their fans, too.
Nick Kelly has been on all sides of the sponsorship equation. He witnessed the religious-like fealty with which fans treated their favorite drivers’ partners in NASCAR early in his career, he’s walked around a stadium seeing product get poured (usually!) with AB InBev, he was in the middle of deals that saw the sponsor selling service back to the property at Verizon, and he’s been at the helm of a major pro sports league as CEO of then-expansion Major League Soccer club Charlotte FC. He talked about the diversity of sponsorship ‘ROI’ and approaches for different brands, a departure from the ‘cookie-cutter’ paradigms that may have persisted at a less enlightened time.
“On the AB (AB InBev) side, it was very marketing-heavy,” said Kelly, who today has taken his years of experience and insights to help others as CEO of Encore Sports and Entertainment. “Like, we could never really tie it to direct sales: one, because it was super complicated, and two, it was illegal. I could never walk into Yankee Stadium and say, ‘Well, only 70% of the beer you’re selling here is mine, but I’m paying you 100% of the sponsorship revenue. What gives?’
“On the Verizon side, you could be very black and white,” he said. “So a lot of it was very marketing ROI driven, brand lift, social media engagements, a lot of the soft metrics, but they mattered. And look, sports still are probably the number one, if not the biggest marketing pillar or marketing channel you can have to drive brand awareness. On the Verizon side, for us, a lot of it was business back. A lot of it was ‘What is the value I can pass to our 130 million consumers?’ I’ve got 130 million consumers; what do they get as a Verizon customer and a Washington Commanders fan? [For example], is there 10% off the team store? Is there early access to tickets? We didn’t really even take into consideration a lot of the soft metrics. They were there, but that wasn’t really driving the immediate value back to us.”
The sponsorship paradigms have undergone more shifts than ever in the last couple of decades, too, as sports teams have adopted new platforms that allow them to reach more fans than ever, and with often wildly unpredictable swings in audience. New signage and new naming rights were easy enough to adapt, but then Facebook posts and tweets and Stories came along, and, more recently, TikTok, where a post could reach hundreds or millions, with even social media managers not always quite sure which posts will hit.
Kelly provided insight from his perch, as he was right in the thick of this rapid evolution in sponsorships, full of opportunities and uncertainties.
“The bigger challenge became as new assets came online, and we wanted to create them with teams; I think we both struggled to price them,” said Kelly. “It’s like, ‘Hey, we want to come up with a content series for TikTok; well, TikTok just started, we’ve never priced that out’. Or when we signed the deal, they only had 20,000 followers, and when the deal came up, they’ve got 3 million. And it’s fair. So I think it became a little bit more of like we do understand the rate card is a league-informed baseline of what teams charge, but not all teams are created equal. And honestly, the content that teams create isn’t all equal.” [Interesting to note that Kelly called out the Jacksonville Jaguars as being particularly good at content during his time working with AB InBev]
The often-volatile nature of sports teams’ audiences, especially on social platforms where the difference between a winning and a losing season could sometimes vastly inflate or deflate the metrics reached, led Kelly and his colleagues at AB InBev to create a new model, an incentives-laden sponsorship deal. The goal for both sides was for the team to crush it, to hit the highest of highs and receive the highest payout; that’s what AB InBev budgeted for, too. Teams can go on championship runs that deliver better and bigger audiences than expected; they can also find a new groove in content production that captures big numbers on social and digital platforms. The new deal structures ensured they could get rewarded for that success. Kelly explained the how and the why.
“In theory, we probably had 15 to $20 million a year at risk that was based in incentives,” he said,” but we fully expected to pay it. But it was very time-consuming and cumbersome to coach all the teams on how to get to that successful metric. It was based on everything from the social media side — we even did it off of attendance or championships — so they can just get paid their bonus now, so then when the renewal comes up, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re more valuable.’ ‘[Well] I already paid you for that. We already paid you for winning a championship, but if you don’t go to the championship, if all of a sudden you go from winning the NBA Finals to not making the playoffs, it’s not like I have a chance to come back down. So it helped us in forecasting a lot.’”
There’s a sense of fairness and trust cultivated with deals like that. And even the notion of ‘coaching’ teams to those metrics caught my eye. Memories are long in professional relationships, and the sports industry is no exception. The importance of honest and open communication was a consistent throughline during my discussion with Kelly, and is no doubt a big part of how he has cultivated successful partnerships, activations, and initiatives over the years.
While you may walk with your head a little higher after buying a new car and feeling you got one over on the salesperson, the best partnerships are when both sides win. The individual on the brand side driving the sponsorship wants to ensure the company’s decision to invest in the partnership was the right one, while the property side wants to also show they more than justified the cost of the deal, and that renewal is an easy decision when the deal expires.
“Nobody on the brand side ever goes into a deal trying to think ‘I gotta get as much out of this as possible because we’re likely not going to renew’,” said Kelly. “The brand side is overly incentivized because they have probably fought to get this deal, so they need to make it look like it’s the smartest decision they have ever made or recommended to their CMO or CEO by getting a ton of value out of it and then ultimately renewing the deal because it was such a great investment.
“Most times when a partnership doesn’t work, it’s either, one, a change of strategy which the team can’t help, or two, the brand itself didn’t put the right resources to get the most out of the partnership. Very seldom is it that the team has not provided or been flexible enough for the brand to get the value out of it. Because, look, no team wants to take any category back to market. So I think a lot of the communication has to come from the brand and the agencies to get to success, because you having to justify why you spent X amount of dollars on a partnership and why that was a bad decision three years later, it’s tough, because it puts your job at jeopardy.”
Kelly continued, discussing why he understands the frustration that can come from each side, as both brand and property want to do right by the partnership, and can feel pressured to deliver and over-deliver on expectations.
“That’s the one thing that we’re counseling some of our clients on now is like, you fought for this, you fought for, or your CMO handed you this or your CEO, you need to make it work,” said Kelly, referencing the advising and work he and his team do today at Encore. “You’re not in a position, and the teams should know that, like, they’re in a position to make all of these deals work. And when they’re being a pain in the ass and they’re asking you for stuff, it’s not because they’re being selfish, and it’s not because they just are trying to get more than they want, they’re trying to justify the expense they made, period.”
These conversations are often framed around how the property (team/league) delivers sufficient value and results for the brand. But, in recent years, as more emerging sports leagues have entered the ecosystem and women’s sports leagues continue to command and demand attention and investment, the pollyannaish paradigm of partnerships are more viable and visible than ever. These are two-way relationships where the partner helps elevate the league/team as much, if not more, than the other way around.
Big brands, with deep pockets, haven’t just put their money where their mouth is, by betting on the growing women’s sports leagues, especially, they’ve also taken action to ensure the gatekeepers appreciate the consumer demand for women’s sports as much as the sponsors believe in them (and the data often dictates).
“They don’t just write the check and then walk away and hope the partners do it all,” said Kelly, discussing the partners of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), who’ve often been vocal about getting games more exposure on broadcast networks, with whom they’ve also invested. “They’re amplifying on their traditional, social media, above the line, everything; they’re there. They’ve done a great job of connecting the dots.
“They don’t just hand the NWSL a check and then say, I don’t have anything left for you, broadcast partners or players. They’ve been able to close the loop. They’re supporting the broadcast partners. Then they’re making demands in a very responsible way of like, ‘We need to see this more on linear [television]. We need to see this more in the right time slots.’ And it really takes somebody with the right vision and the right brand, with the right vision to pull it forward because the commissioners of these leagues are in a tough spot because they want to drive as much revenue as possible to the league to then disperse out to all the owners. Then obviously they want the teams driving their own revenue, too. But when you get a brand like Ally who does the full flywheel of every point, everybody gets a little piece, and everybody’s getting elevated.”
There’s a perception bump, too, that can come when a big-name brand signs on to partner with an emerging league. Pick your favorite upstart league and its trajectory can often be seen through its sponsor roster. The endemics typically come first; it makes sense for equipment manufacturers and apparel partners, for example, to sign up early and a lot of the early fans are participants in the sports, so fit a sweet spot segment of potential customers for brands endemic to the sport. As the fan base broadens, with more interest and engagement, so, too, does the list of partners.
Before long, well-known brands in the auto, insurance, beverage, quick-service restaurant, and other CPG and B2B brands seeking to reach a wide swath of fans. The day a league signs a blue-chip brand like AB InBev can be a signficant signpost — a big brand believes in the league, and the windfall that comes with such a sponsorship allows for further investment and growth. Kelly reflected on this idea, noting the big brands he represented were cognizant about what their investment could mean to a growing league.
“We weren’t naive to the influence we had when we were at either one of those companies I worked at, because, we knew that if we came on to a league early on, because we believed in it, it helped establish credibility for the league if you have, you know, a Budweiser or Verizon on board early,” he said. “And it was just very much a ‘Do we believe that this is, one, good for us because we’re hitting another audience?’ And two, ‘Do we believe they have the infrastructure in place to actually go and drive even incremental value for us than we actually are investing?’
“We saw hundreds of presentations over the years from esports teams. And, you know, we did Drone Racing League for a while, all these other ones where it was just like, you know, it meant a lot. For us, it became a little bit more we got on the sales tour with them promoting like, well, why did you invest? And they would just say, ‘Hey, can brand X call you and tell you about what you’re doing in our sport?’ And it’s like, sure. So, oftentimes in these emerging sports we became a little bit more of like an evangelist for why did you invest. And look, we felt that it was a privilege and also a responsibility of, if we were investing here, we got to see that it works.”
Sports sponsorships may have started out, decades ago, as advertising transactions and static assets, but they’ve since evolved into integrated relationships. The most successful deals today are no longer about merely buying access, but about engineering a dynamic where every stakeholder wins: the brand justifies its investment, the property elevates its value, the emerging league gains credibility, the fans receive better, more engaging experiences.
The modern sponsorship is a flywheel where both sides, and increasingly the fans, are fully invested in the other’s success. It requires honest communication, the flexibility to account for unpredictable growth, and the vision to see an investment not just as a cost, but as a commitment to the growth of the entire sport. The biggest win isn’t just a renewal, it’s a legacy of impact.
A good sports sponsorship is one that leaves all parties better off for the relationship. It’s not just a line item on the budget, but a statement of shared belief, proving that when partners rise together, everybody wins.
It’s easy to fall into a trap after years of working in sports (or any industry). It’s just difficult to see things from an objective point of view, taking on the perspective of the ‘normal’ fan or consumer.
That’s why I love peppering friends, family, and, heck, complete strangers with questions about their experience as sports fans. Avoiding an insular point of view is critical to effectively understand the fan experience — the motivations, challenges, and opportunities. And that’s why each year when my Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast hits a milestone (12 years this year!), I’ve had friends and family members appear on the pod to ask about their relationship to sports and experience as a fan. I learned from my brother, an avid fantasy player and diehard San Diego Padres fan, my mom, a non-sports fan who became one of the biggest Anaheim Ducks fans you’ll meet, and, this year, my brother-in-law, Richard Schulman.
Rich grew up a sports fan, cheering on the Los Angeles Dodgers and Lakers. He became a big fan of Cal during his undergrad experience in Berkeley. For years, he’s always been aware of the sports zeitgeist, tuning into the biggest events and having enough knowledge to carry on a conversation about the sports news of the day or debate the biggest topics. Today, he’s a father of four, working (quite successfully!) in real estate, challenged for time to follow sports, but a season ticket holder for Angel City FC, because he’s raising girls who love to play soccer (and go to ACFC games with their friends).
I came away from my interview with Rich with a ton of insight about what it’s like to be a time-strapped father trying to balance keeping up with sports while keeping up with his kids, who adopted a team that didn’t exist when he was growing up, because it’s fun to do with his daughters. Here are some key lessons and takeaways:
Time is the Limiting Factor for Fandom
The days are still 24 hours as one starts to build a family, but the days are necessarily more managed and time feels more crunched. Rich can recall days in the past when he’d settle in to watch a day of sports or attend a game not knowing what time the game would end, but now such uncertainty is downright daunting. That’s part of the appeal for Angel City games (and Savannah Bananas games), he explained.
“Now I’m constrained on time. Like, I took my seven year-old to a Savannah Bananas game. I’m sure you’re familiar with them; and the same with soccer, it’s like you get there and you sit down and exactly two hours later you’re walking to the car.
“I can take my kids to an Angel City game, which is the women’s pro team in LA, it’s like on a schedule. It’s like 7:00 game; I like to go early with the kids, we can walk around; but I can leave my house at 6:00, I can sit down at 6:30, the game starts at 7:00, the game is over by 8:45, I’m home by 9:30. It’s a pretty tight time. And the kids like it…
“So sports now has to fit into a box. Like, I can watch playoffs. But you know, I used to watch college football Saturday all day, and I could just watch a random three-hour football game. You can’t do that anymore.”
Takeaway:
We’ve already seen Major League Baseball, in particular, take proactive steps to limit the duration of its games, introducing a clock to the sport that had been distinct by its lack of a countdown time function. Recognize that parents, in particular, are balancing mealtimes, naptimes, and school nights. Part of the appeal of sports is the escape, leaving worries and clock watching aside, but that’s often not realistic for busy parents (and many adults, in general). While we can’t build in assurances, we can be more proactive about helping fans fit in their sports, whether that’s providing average duration and end times, recognizing some fans won’t stay or watch the full game (in person or at home), and helping them still be fans and have enjoyable, stress-free experiences nonetheless.
Following Sports Closely Ain’t Easy
There are days when there’s an exciting buzzer beater or an unreal comeback, and it feels like everyone has to be aware of this, right? But the reality you are the minority if you’re refreshing the Twitter feed every few minutes or locked into notifications for Adam Schefter and Shams reports, and planning your weekends around sports. There are certain transcendent news stories that break through for Rich, however; I offered the Luka Doncic trade, as an example. And while Rich rarely finds time to sit down and watch most of ant game, the playoffs, especially when they involve his team, can be an exception to the rule.
“For something big like [the Luka Doncic trade], like that’ll show up on the regular news or my social feed will pop because I have friends who care more than me about it…But now it’s crazy that people would even think about spending that much time watching.
“You know, when the playoffs come around, I’ll get interested. I watched most of the Dodgers playoff games last year. Except, of course, the game they won the World Series, I was at soccer with the kids and they went down 5-0. I’m like, Well, I guess we’re not watching that game. We’ll just watch tomorrow’s game. And then on the drive home, they tied the game. But I watched the whole game one with the kids with the Freddie Freeman Grand Slam, so they all saw that.”
Takeaway:
When I worked on the team side, I often reminded myself that, as unlikely as it seems, some fans really were learning about big news for the first time from the team’s social posts or emails or text alerts. Don’t take for granted the median fan of the team is as informed as the top 1-5% who engage with every post and have their fandom listed in their IG bio. But do recognize, too, that less-engaged fans often still have avid, informed fangelists in their social circles or friend groups that are on top of things. They’re the ones pinging the group chat or whose posts make it to the Facebook feed of their friends and family; help those vocal fans be the messenger.
Sports are Social and Season Tickets are about Convenience as much as Benefits
There are lot of reasons fans decide to become season ticket holders across any professional or collegiate sport. Just as there are myriad reasons fans enjoy attending games. For Rich, going to Angel City games was not necessarily because his daughters, avid soccer players themselves, wanted to see professional soccer; it was a social outing with friends. For young kids, and by proxy their parents, sports are an early social vehicle (along with school, of course). Friendships are formed through playing sports, and attending sports events are great, novel ‘play dates,’ where friends can have new experiences and make memories together.
In addition, make special note of the difference Rich saw in the way his girls responded to Angel City (NWSL) and LAFC (MLS). It’s great that we tend to see both little girls AND little boys enjoy women’s sports, and interesting (and powerful) for little girls to be awestruck by seeing women as superstars, competing in front of big crowds at the highest level.
The decision to invest in season tickets ties together a lot of the aforementioned ideas in this piece — predictability, social, and convenience.
“We had gone to some LAFC games, me and the girls. We had friends that had tickets, so we would occasionally go with them on their tickets or buy tickets near them, and they liked it. I mean, it was neat for them. It was really interesting when Angel City came around, the same friend and another friend got season tickets and we thought, Oh, we’re not going to go to all the games, and then we went and the girls had a much better reaction to girls playing soccer than boys playing soccer, which to me, maybe it sounds obvious; I was surprised just because, like, I didn’t really ever think about it. We had pretty good seats. It’s a small stadium, it’s a nice, intimate venue, but you’re still like 100 feet away from a player. And if they do a throw in right underneath your seats; like, I can throw a baseball probably to the players that are closest to us.
“But [my daughters] really responded. So then we ended up getting [season tickets]…“There’s only like 10 or 12 home games, so it makes sense, once you start going to them. You can have your tickets that you want to have…We like to have the same seats, next to friends. The seats are good, it’s reliable, I don’t have to worry about going online. You know, Ticketmaster is still a poor experience to buy tickets. So it’s just nice to see, Okay. I have my tickets, I don’t have to think about it.”
Takeaway:
For many fans, sports events are a third place. It’s where you see or spend time with friends, sometimes it’s the only place you see certain friends. How can we better integrate this behavior into sports? Could purchasing tickets (especially directly from the team) be negineered to make it easy to be paired with another buyer or could we rethink what ‘group sales’ means when it’s 2-3 families instead of a company, church, or youth team? And while season ticket membership benefits are great (I spoje with Rich about some cool experiences on the field his girls get to have because of season ticket member or group sales benefits), don’t overlook the little things — the convenience, the reduction of stress, the reliability.
[Still thinking about the remark about the ‘different response’ his girls had to watching women play, too]
Accessibility is an Underrated Aspect for Kids Becoming Fans
Sports fandom has evolved in the last couple of decades, and many fans tend to follow athletes as much as teams. But, especially for kids at that vital age range (~ 8-11 years old, give or take), there is a greater correlation between proximity and their favorite players. There’s still a bit of magic for little kids to meet any professional athlete, they’re demigods even if kids don’t know their names. And while fans may follow stars like Messi or Ohtani or LeBron wherever they go, for little kids, it’s the star players they’re able to see IRL that have a higher likelihood of capturing their young hearts. With all that in mind, it’s worthwhile to note what Rich says about the flux nature of the Angel City roster and how that affects the propensity for the kdis to get to know players by name and, in turn, want to follow them (and the team) more avidly on and off the pitch.
“[The girls] don’t follow it like I used to follow sports, but they know the best players, like the main starting players. Angel City seems to have a constantly changing roster of players, so it’s been a little challenging to attach. But like, you know, let’s say Alyssa Thompson is their best or most notable player, like when we met her at the stadium after the game, they go down and try to get autographs, they’re really excited. Hannah recognized her and her sister at the mall, and we tracked down Alyssa Thompson at the mall…“But they probably couldn’t tell you 11 players on the team and we don’t really follow — like, Angel City has not been successful at winning soccer games. So we haven’t really been following their games that we don’t go to…
“[His daughters] get excited even when they meet [any] player. You know, they got an autograph last week at the game, and we don’t know who the person is. I have a picture of her, I have to figure out who it was. But she was excited, it was a former player who signed her jersey. So sometimes, if they go down to the field, they’ll get a signature from some of the other team, like the backup goalie from their team, but they’re still excited.”
Takeaway:
There’s not much we can do about the dynamic nature of rosters these days (incidentally, Rich also lamented his Cal fandom diminishing as the program’s top football players annually enter the transfer portal). The issue is a big one in sports — the dilution of unconditional love for a team, exacerbated by closer ties to individual players, the majority of whom won’t be on the team for their entire careers. But the good news is that because of that smaller world for young kids, when they’re at the age that their lifelong fandom can form, they’re more likely to latch onto the local team and its players. Make it easy for young fans to fall in love with the team, every last one of them. One of the best parts of women’s sports, especially, is before and after each game, a lot of the athletes (including the superstars) make time for kids, giving them lifelong memories and special moments that can form powerful connections. Give more kids more opportunities to make lifelong memories that involve the team, stories that’ll be etched in stone and in their hearts and minds for life.
A Couple More Quick Quotes
I wanted to include these additional quotes, but without extensive analysis.
The first represents the challenge of trying to balance sports participation for four kids. At a time when sports specialization is increasingly prevalent, and increasingly questioned, Rich’s girls have primarily stuck to soccer. Parents drive a lot of early exposure to sports and recreational participation, and it’s not easy when the kids and their social and sports and other obligations start to pile up. But also take note of another theme from my interview with Rich, how soccer has become a fulcrum for friendships. Specialization and playing club soccer and tournaments isn’t about just about playing more soccer, it’s spending more time with their friends.
“I don’t know how people do it with multiple sports. I mean, I know it’s probably better for the kids overall. It’s probably better for their sports. But at some point you have to say you gotta play soccer year round if you want to advance in soccer. Like, it’d be neat if you also had time to be like a swimmer and a volleyball player, but with four kids, it’s just not going to happen….It’s not really challenging because, you know, they are invited to play on an all star team and they get excited for that, and they generally tend to become friends with the other all stars. So it’s like you want to do more soccer with your friends? Of course.”
Rich has taken his kids to a handful of different sports events over the years, so we talked about the experience of being a parent and taking a young kid (or group of kids) to a game. What’s the right age to start taking them, how the kids experience it, and what their particular experience with Angel City is like.
“Probably around 6 or 7 [is the right age to start taking kids to games]. I mean, Leah will watch a whole game, but last game we went to, they wanted to go buy candy, and I’m like, there’s 20 minutes left in the game, you’re not going to go buy candy. You know, wander the stadium and go buy candy and miss the whole game. So you know, something like that…
“[Angel City] has a lot of stuff going on before the game, which is nice. The food options have dwindled as attendance has trailed off. They always have a local musical thing happening. They have some celebrity fans they highlight, which is neat. But they should focus on putting out a winning product on the field and that will kind of solve [things].”
Thank you again to my brother-in-law, Rich, for being a great dad to my nieces and nephew, and for helping us celebrate 12 years of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast by offering his experiences and opinions as a fan and father!
All-access and mic’d-up players are now a part of every team and league’s arsenal. 360-degree replays, video game-like mirrorless cameras, drone shots, aerial cams, POV views, net cameras, cinematic hype videos that could be mistaken for Hollywood trailers — the acceleration in content quality, diversity, and innovation is remarkable.
So how the hell is a team’s content expected to cut through, stand out, and grab a fan’s attention away from the screens and feeds vying for their eyeballs, minds, and hearts?
There’s no single right answer to the challenge (sorry!), but by breaking from expectations, telling deeper stories that feel made for you and command attention, and embracing novelty, there’s a chance to get fans to stop and engage.
Greg Walter and his team at 2Tall Animation aren’t trying to replace the incredible highlights and photos that sports produce. Those continue to play a major role in fan acquisition and engagement, fueled by the daily renewal of more eye-popping plays and moments. But there’s a reason animation is such a powerful complement for sports and sports fans. It can embellish the inherent mythology in sports and bring to life the legends with which fans already identify in sports. And animation can allow teams and leagues to explore and exploit unique places in storytelling, creating and capturing fan passion in the process.
“The way we think about sports media is 99% of it is photo and footage based, and it should be, because people want to see their heroes, they want to see the games,” said Walter, the Owner and Creative Director of 2Tall Animation, the animation production studio specializing in sports. “But what’s the other 1%? We feel like we’re the other 1% that somebody might grab onto if they want to do something completely different, or if they want to create some media where they can control it and go anywhere they want to, because you can go into any storytelling space, you can go into any visual space with animation.”
The versatility of animation means it can serve many masters and aim to achieve diverse goals. But the often-exaggerated nature of animated projects is more conducive to enhancing the avidity of existing fans. Consider those illustrations that leagues such as the NFL and NBA will put out around holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, full of exacting details that only the biggest fans will recognize and appreciate. It’s those types of ‘if you know you know’ elements that strengthen fan identities and lead casual fans to want to enhance their own immersion into the property.
Walter discussed how thoughtful 2Tall is with its clients in identifying those brand elements and esoterica, which bring to life that community and identity.
“Usually it’s to take the current audience and take them to a new place. Like, it’s not necessarily to gain a new audience. It’s to double down on what the audience is already excited about,” Walter said about the nature of 2Tall’s objectives with clients. “Especially if we’re doing something in venue or we’re doing something on social media, what we really want to do is we want to create a piece that looks like it was made by a local for that team.
“And what I mean by that is we’ll dig into all the local Easter eggs. We’ll have a lot of creative meetings to figure out, Okay, where is the team? Who are the heroes? And more importantly, who are the fans? What is the culture around the team? And even more importantly, why do these fans love following this team? Besides geography, what about this team do they put their hopes and dreams in so that they would stick with this team when they’re good, when they’re bad? Is it a blue-collar city where it’s [about] grit and hard work? Is it a flashy city where you want to go big and lights and all that stuff? What’s drawing the moths to the flame?
“And then how do we show something interesting and new to this audience to get it even more excited and to see the team, the city, the franchise in an interesting new way?”
As Walter described the depth of exploration in their animation projects, it became apparent how powerful the animations can be to foment the brand — its messages, totems, tokens, and traits. One may not instantly think of a cool video board hype reel or an illustrative storytelling vehicle on social media to create a brand platform, but the degree of familiarity and fidelity built into the animations, combined with the unique visual appeal, can open (or create) new worlds to explore across mediums and touch points.
“More and more as we approach teams, and we’re creating videos for them, we’re also packaging up still assets for them, and we’re writing into the contracts we’ll also get you some still assets you can use over some looping assets that you can use on your boards any way you want, or in your merch,” said Walter. “And you can cross-purpose this stuff, so you’re not paying for something that’s going to show once or even once before each game. You’re paying for a package of other things that you can then give to your video team, to your merch team, and then they can recompile them in interesting ways.”
Whether animated or not, teams and leagues produce countless videos of varying forms that aim to stir emotion in their fans — at games in the arena or stadium, on social and mobile in the feeds and stories, and on countless other platforms. But while the social feeds may give you some semblance of performance through likes, comments, and shares, it remains difficult to understand when this content truly breaks through. The best content doesn’t inspire tapping a heart; it touches the heart, making the fan feel something, enhancing what it means to them to be a fan.
In evaluating the success of their projects, Walter and his colleagues and clients recognize there are variables they can and cannot control. If the team is mired in a slump or losing situation, that’s bound to affect how any content is received, animated or otherwise. At the same time, when the content does hit with its full intended effect, especially in-venue, there’s no easily quantifiable way to know it. So, for Walter and 2Tall, it’s part-art, part-science.
“You can’t measure ‘Did the audience get a little bit louder when they saw this thing?'” said Walter. “I will say that we did a couple of things for the Super Bowl this year. We did one for the Eagles and one for the Chiefs. The one for the Eagles played when the Eagles were really at their peak, and the crowd went wild for it. The one the Chiefs, unfortunately, played right as the crowd started realizing that this one was really getting out of hand, and it was a dead room, apparently. So it’s little bits of data like that that we can go on.”
Not all animation is meant to serve the same purpose or elicit the same feeling, either. If you haven’t yet gone and looked up any of 2Tall’s work, there’s no telling what you’re picturing as you read about ‘animation.’ Maybe it’s something akin to anime, or perhaps something resembling the Nickelodeon cartoons of the ’90s and ’00s; animation represents a vast spectrum, and to put animation in a single box is inaccurate. So, this whole conversation about animation in sports is multifarious, a menu within the medium that organizations should navigate with intentionality.
“There’s kind of a choice point,” explained Walter, who founded 2Tall in 2012. “Do I want to go into a lane that people already know and work within that, or do I want to use animation? That can be anything. You can go collage, you can go rotoscope animation, which is traced animation, you can do trippy, you can do photorealistic, you can do graphic novel, you can do street art. You can do a whole bunch of different things. You know, what satisfies the assignment the best?
“If you want to do street art, there’s a materiality about street art. You expect pavement, you expect walls. There’s a tangibility to it that we can work with to give something that’s got kind of a solid feel, where your feet are on the ground and you feel like you’re at ground level, or we can do something crazy and trippy that’s got lots of colors and it’s out in space.”
This article started out by lamenting the Sisyphean quest to produce content that stands out. There’s a perpetual arms race in content, not just in sports, but on every screen and frame vying for sustained attention. The velocity and volume may be greater than ever, but the cyclical, one-upsmanship nature of creative is simply part of the game. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Creative is a field that compounds. The evolution and innovation will continue because new ideas build upon existing ones. The roots of just about any creative field can be traced back centuries, so it’s not about eschewing convention, but veering just a bit, taking chances, and playing outside the lines of expectation. As Walter has survived and thrived amidst the accelerated timelines of creative trends and techniques, he welcomes the challenge of giving fans something different. Something that’ll make them stop, notice, and digest.
“People’s relationship with social media is very problematic, but it exists and we are existing to create content for that,” he said. “And people are comfortable with the thing that they like to go on and slide through. But I think people are hungry to be surprised. And anytime that you can give somebody a good surprise, there are bad surprises too, but a good surprise, that’s a little victory. That’s like a breadcrumb that can lead to other things as well.
“And that’s kind of how a lot of this churn happens. It’s like somebody does something interesting, you know, and then someone else sees it and they’re like, I can take that a little bit further, and then it churns into something bigger.”
HELPFUL RECAP AND REVIEW — I went to a Premier Lacrosse League game and captured the experience, fan engagement, activations, partnership, game presentation, and more. Scroll through to get a look at the fan zone and game day (in San Diego). Here are some top-level observations and insights:
🥍 A lot of touring teams (and teams in general) do fan zones and this one was particularly well-conceived. Backed by a QR code-led scavenger hunt, among other QR code CTAs, and fun, well thought-out partner activations, this was good for kids, experienced lax players and noobs, and to develop the brand, league, and further capture and cultivate fans. 🟢 This was only open to admitted fans, but I could also see them allowing any fans to come in (with pre-registrations if space is limited). With annual tour stops, the publicly-open fan zone could be a good way for fans to tell their extended network to come out.
🥍 Pretty much all the activations involved getting lacrosse sticks in hands, exposing the game. Though the vast majority of fans (I mean, probably 75% if not higher) appeared to have at least family or group member with experience playing lacrosse. The games were simple enough for a novice like me to give it a go with a stick and ball multiple times, one of the few times in my life I’ve had the opportunity to do so! 🟢 Despite the high concentration of experienced players, I was still surprised to not see local organizations onsite that could provide the answer to ‘How do I get started’ for an interested parent and child, such as a local youth lacrosse league, clinic, or camp (they do have a lot of resources on their website). There were a good amount of youth players and teams in attendance (and a youth team got recognized before the game on the field). Relatedly, the PLL could do better to engage noobs like me, such as explaining penalties when a power player is awarded, describing what’s being challenged in a review (I had to ask fans next to me), and doing more with stats with fans in general (face-offs, ground balls, power plays, even the two-point shots unique to PLL, etc.)
🥍 The PLL had plenty of data capture opportunities and much of their promotion was less about finding new fans than about getting fans to join PLL Nation, their premium membership platform (more details in the deck). They had the aforementioned QR codes posted with various CTAs, they handed out cards with QR codes for enter-to-win opportunities, and signage + in-game CTAs to scan a QR code to enter to win — solely open to PLL Nation members. 🟢 PLL Nation membership is similar to other team/league memberships — season tickets (but with their single annual stops that’s less of an incentive) along with merch discounts, the exclusive contests and sweepstakes, and exclusive content. It’s a good opportunity to identify and activate their biggest fans and something a lot of leagues and teams — with a surfeit of remote fans — are doing or exploring to monetize their fan base at a global level
🥍 The demographic was very very young. Most sports outside the big four leagues tend to skew younger, but the PLL even more so than others I’ve checked out seemed to be like 60% of the attendance was kids (mostly boys) in the 6-14 age range. The diversity was lacking a bit (an issue lacrosse in general and the PLL are aiming to improve), but the density of young kids excited to see pro lacrosse and looking up to these players is a great sign 🟢 The thing about young boys — it’s hard to get them to sit still too long. Not in a bad way, but from what I could tell there were a lot of kids in and out of their seats throughout the game (and the games move fast with lots of scoring!). The game presentation is often limited by the venues where the PLL plays, but there could be room for improvement here — just more opportunities for young kids to scream (literally, the WNBA and NWSL games I’ve been to do a good job of that). They did have a flex cam and some in-game contests and a t-shirt toss, but there could be more video board games (hat shuffles, et al.) and PA-led cheers.
🥍 The PLL does a good job of carving out revenue opportunities at their games. You’ll see in the photos below the way they create premium in a way agnostic to the venues and offer various upgraded experiences fans can purchase while at the game. They also had a nice traveling pop-up merch tent with diverse offerings (more so than you see at most merch kiosks at sporting events) 🟢 They also had a nice display showcasing the team jerseys (and team brands in general) around the merch tent as they aim to continue to drive forth the team branding. (Go California Redwoods!) The player-specific posters, jerseys, and bobbleheads also help promote their star players. I could also see a mini pop-up ode to the sport and the PLL, a mini pop-up museum or Hall of Fame of sorts, honoring the sport’s native origins and the upstart league’s history (and the Rabil brothers who founded it)
🥍 The game experience overall felt ‘big league’ — they had instant replays, in-game animations, and even custom songs for each PLL team (Like, for real, a California Redwoods song?!? This should be even more feasible in the age of gen AI ) 🟢 Perhaps limited by the venue (and alluded to earlier), there seemed to be a dearth of stats available to fans in-stadium. Little things like shots, let alone more advanced stats like caused turnovers, ground balls, face-off percentage, two-point attempts, etc.) and no promotion of their PLL Fantasy game that I caught. Getting fans more engrossed in the stats will only help with engagement and more ways to gamify the event opens up the opportunities for those juicy partnerships with sports gaming companies
I could go all day on this stuff, but hopefully if you skimmed through all of that you learned something! It was a great day out and, as you can see in the slideshow below, full of great engagement, fun, and value for fans and partners. The Premier Lacrosse League is a remarkable story and they continue to grow as a league and brand, and in turn lift up the sport of lacrosse with it. They had a great All-Star weekend on ESPN/ABC this past weekend and lots more gamed to play this summer. (The WLL, too, though there was surprisingly limited mention of them onsite). Cheers to the PLL!
Consider all the diverse things that can unite groups of people — a favorite sports team, a beloved musical artist, a story (aka ‘IP’), a shared hobby, and the list goes on.
Everyone is passionate about something. And in our instinctual yearning for connection, there’s a powerful feeling when we encounter others who share that passion. Mutual interests become conversations, which evolve into meaningful relationships, and over time, a collection of individuals coalesces into a united community. They may take on other monikers — a fan base, a subreddit, a Tok (i.e. BookTok), a BeyHive, but these are powerful collectives that, together, can drive moments and propel culture (and commerce) forward.
Evan Parker learned the power of community early on in his career, coming up in roles at Edelman, where he worked with XBox 360 (among other brands), and at NASCAR. Businesses spend so much time, effort, and resources trying to propagate their message and build their brands, but there are people already out there with a passion for the areas in which brands play. To harness that passion is more effective and efficient than any PR campaign or advertisement.
“There’s only so much reach that any brand has,” said Parker, “but if you can talk to the right people and they talk to their friends, they talk to their communities, you’re able to expand that way. And it’s a lot easier to go pitch somebody who already loves what you’re doing, or is already interested in what you’re doing, than it is to go pitch The New York Times and try to get them to write the article that you wish that they would write that’s going to get read by all these people…
“Before social media was really a thing, community was the best way to go build a business. And if you could get people to love what you were doing and be evangelistic about what you’re trying to build, you have a shot at doing something pretty special.”
Parker is working to do something special now. Last year, he, along with Alexis Ohanian and Brent Montgomery, launched Mantel, a social network and content platform for collectors. The three individuals had been part of the fragmented coterie of collectors for years, with investor and Reddit co-founder Ohanian boasting an impressive sports collection, Montgomery, whose Wheelhouse is behind such shows like King of Collectibles and Pawn Stars, and Parker a collector himself and veteran of the sports space — and they saw an opportunity to bring all these collectors together, to give them a place to call home.
The collectibles space is booming, in case you haven’t noticed. There are countless creators, and platforms dedicated to ‘breaks,’ auctions and sales making headlines every day, it seems like, and a still-evolving paradigm for digital collectibles. Regardless of whether someone is moved by history, a hope for a financial return, or some sentimental value, collectors all appreciate the stories behind the items. That’s what Parker sees in Mantel, and the promise ahead as the platform continues to grow and brings together the items, the stories, and the people telling them.
“All of these people are in it for their own motivation,” said Parker who is CEO of Mantel, which launched publicly in December 2024. “I think what connects people, though, is the excitement of it, and the feeling that it brings; the nostalgia or the connection to these athletes, the stories behind it. We really are trying as much as we can to make sure that people are not just saying, ‘Here’s a card that I pulled’, but ‘Here’s a card that I pulled, and this is why it’s interesting to me’, or ‘this is what I’m thinking about’, or here’s a question I have about it.’ Like, can we get one level deeper?…
“How do we just break it down to the reason why people are interested in this, or if you’re not interested in it, what’s the thing that we can get you interested in?”
Parker continued, noting that while some may collect baseball cards, others seek stamps, and still others love movie memorabilia or comic books. Mantel is a place for all of them.
“I really believe that [for] everything that exists, every physical item, every digital item, there are communities that collect it, there are people who are interested in it,” said Parker, “and if the story is interesting — there are people who might not care about that topic at all, but because you told an interesting story, it’s like, ‘Okay, I don’t want to go collect that myself, but I really respect that you do. I’m really excited that I learned about that. I know more now than I did yesterday.'”
It’s the stories and collective interest that make certain collectibles so valuable. There are plenty of 1-of-1 or otherwise extremely rare items and cards that are worth pennies, while others are worth millions. Take a moment and consider the logic and rationale behind that. Why is a mint-condition Michael Jordan rookie card worth so much? Where does a Mickey Mantle card derive its value, or even a hat once worn by Abraham Lincoln, as opposed to any other 19th-century stovepipe? These are values that render any economic models meaningless. Supply and demand are part of the picture, to be sure, but some special forces are driving that demand.
It was revelatory and thought-provoking to consider this overarching question as Parker and I talked through the most famous collectible in sports, the T206 Honus Wagner card. Honus Wagner was one of the best shortstops of all-time, but he wasn’t Babe Ruth or Willie Mays or otherwise all that important to history. And yet it’s his 1909 card that has commanded small fortunes every time it has passed hands over the years.
“You hear all these reasons why [the T206 Honus Wagner] was [so well-known], the one that Wayne Gretzky bought, and the one that was altered and the one that was sold for this amount of money and that had this grade and that,” Parker described. “You know, every year [at] the National Sports Card Collectors Convention, there are dinners that get put together [and] the only way you get to go is if you own a T206, and all this stuff sort of builds this intrigue. And now this card, more than 100 years after it debuted, is a card that people who never watched sports, who don’t really care about baseball, they know that this card is interesting. And I think that’s sort of the magic of collecting.
“But it comes down to storytelling and community. Because the community decided that this was the card, not other cards from the T206 series…that [card] helps kind of illustrate to me why what we’re building at Mantel has the chance to be something really powerful, because we can bring people together and to tell stories and to build community that can then transcend in the same way that that card has.”
The best collectibles are imbued with meaning. They’re something collectors are proud to display (and post on Mantel), they’re conversation starters, relationship accelerants, identity enhancers. These traits are where sports teams can take heed, said Parker, when I asked him what sports leagues and teams can learn from the community and industry of sports collectors. They have no shortage of items — t-shirts and caps, bobbleheads and rally towels, and of course every piece of equipment and apparel associated with milestone achievements gets marked and pulled for posterity.
But the vast majority of things teams give away and sell don’t accrue more value over time, they rarely carry grander and broadly accessible narratives.
“I think that teams need to be spending more time thinking about how to create things that have interests beyond when it gets handed to you,” said Parker, who, like many collectors, laments the gradual disappearance of physical tickets in sports. “You know, a team will spend a lot of money putting towels on every seat for a playoff game, and at the end of the playoff game, half of them are still in their seats. Somebody will bring it home and it’ll end up as a dish rag. Somebody else will put it on their wall, but it kind of loses its appeal at that point.
“But if you can create something that has lasting value, that somebody wants to show their friends, wants to post on Mantel or another social network, that might have monetary value down the line, I think it just kind of anchors you to those moments, to those teams, to those athletes in important ways.”
The paradigm that assigns monetary value in the sports card and collectibles space has persisted for generations. There’s no set date when all of a sudden the value of sports cards increased exponentially, but the industry has been around for several decades now, with ebbs and flows throughout. Few really question the model that propels the space, just like we all accept that rare works of art (only by specific artists) are worth a lot more than others.
Well, then digital collectibles came along and the paradigm fell apart. Consensus gave way to speculative bubbles and discord about where digital collectibles and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) fit. Should the value of tokens come from exclusive community, not too far off from the T206 owners and their get-together at the National Sports Card Convention each year? If the value is in the eye of the beholder, there’s a certain trust and belief that the beholders comprising the collectible community will persist, if not grow, over time. Parker isn’t taking a hard stance on digital collectibles, watching the space with curiosity and the context of being immersed in a diverse community of collectors every day.
“It’s hard to discount what happens over time,” he said. “You know, we care about certain baseball cards that have been around for more than 100 years now. We grow up, and it’s something, before we [have] money, we’re liking it because our parents liked it, their parents liked it, we ended up liking it, [so did] our friends. Now we’re older and we have this connection of more than 100 years worth of this history. It’s rare.
“NFTs didn’t exist, and then all of a sudden they existed. We’re older, we could say, does this make sense? I just think that maybe had you and I been around in 1909, we would have had a different perspective of the T206 [Honus Wagner card]. ‘This is stupid. You could go buy a pack of smokes and get this card. Honus Wagner was good, but who cares? There’s all these other players.’ Walter Johnson was in that set. But we weren’t there then. So we’re now just inheriting these stories that took place before we were alive that have helped shape our worldview. Whereas with NFTs, we got to make it ourselves…
Parker continued, offering a balanced take on the uncertainty of where NFTs will go and the most important element to track as the space evolves.
“I just think the world is changing at such a high pace, and people are skeptical of it because they want to say, ‘Okay, is this thing going to be around? Am I just going to buy it because it’s a get-rich-quick [scheme]? Or is there a chance that I’m going to really care about this in 5 to 10 years?’
“If you’re building a brand in the NFT space, I would be thinking about how do I make sure that this is something that people are still going to care about down the line, versus how do I make sure that people are going to just go buy and trade these really quickly, I make my money, I disappear, and all these people are now left with something worthless.”
There’s no pyramid scheme at play when the beliefs of the community are driven by passion. The value of collectibles, in whatever form, persists (and grows, through scarcity and demand) because a critical mass of people believe in the meaning, the stories, and the connection these otherwise worthless items convey.
There are billion-dollar industries fueled by otherwise worthless endeavors, held up by stories and ancillary businesses that develop around them, which further buttress and grow said industry. That emotion you feel screaming at your TV because you’re watching a group of men or women playing a child’s game, the pride you feel in having a home run ball hit by your favorite player, the intangible mystique and aura surrounding a bank receipt stained with blood from Bonnie and Clyde (a real item posted by a user on Mantel!) — that’s all real and why the community of collectors is so strong. Parker lives in it every day, endlessly astonished by the treasures that collectors share on Mantel. And it’s why he and his team are so excited to keep building and engaging, bringing these people together and surfacing and amplifying more stories. The hunt, he reminds me, is just as important as the treasure one’s hunting. We’re all looking for a good story to tell. It’s about the exhibition, sure, but it’s about all the stories that live within it.
“The stuff that really gets me excited is seeing the things that get the community excited, because that’s why I’m into it,” said Parker. “I love to go to a museum. I love to go to shops and see things that I’ve never seen before. I get to sit at my desk all day and just see this endless stream of content of people showing me their personal museums, the things that get them excited. I don’t have to leave my desk.
“It’s like Cooperstown, the Smithsonian, all these things that exist on my screen 24 hours a day because the community is so passionate about the things that they’re interested in.”
Some of the earliest social media hires in sports are now VPs and SVPs. Social media and content have always been inextricably tied to the underlying business and brand for sports organizations, but for years their impact was mostly acknowledged by vibes. Then likes, impressions, and views added a more data-driven and analytical bent.
Today, an organization’s social media and content strategy isn’t expected to deliver likes and comments, the expectation is to drive direct impact on key business objectives.
With such a lofty ascension, there are better questions being asked, more operationalized workflows, more documented guidelines and guardrails, and more thoughtfulness behind every post, piece of creative, and word that gets in front of fans. The ever-increasing fan touchpoints, an insatiable demand for content, and the realization that social media is where organizations can learn about their fans, grow the fan base and brand, and create new marketing funnels and revenue streams — the level of sophistication and discourse has never been higher.
These were among the key themes at this year’s second annual Gondola Sports Summit, which brought together the leaders and producers who bring sports fans all the content, copy, memes, and more that drive such engagement and earned media — and further key organizational objectives.
I was fortunate to attend the conference, which took place in Denver, May 19-21, and featured speakers from several of the biggest teams and leagues in sports, agencies that work with these organizations, and representatives from many of the platforms where fans consume and converse around all that content. There were countless insights and examples, inspirational stories, revelatory ideas, and warm camaraderie. What follows are a few actionable insights from the panels, which built on the theme of social media and sports growing up. We’ve raced well past the tropes of interns, the power of content and social being recognized and appreciated for all the value it can deliver.
What the sports world needs to know about Reddit
Reddit has kind of been having a moment, and not just in sports. It’s increasingly one of the last true large ‘social’ broadcast platforms left, a place where businesses and brands can get unfettered insight into what fans are saying, and more tied into the information users get, whether querying AI or Google.
Sports are not new to Reddit; there have been tons of engagement and conversation happening on various subreddits for years. But now the teams and leagues themselves are taking notice. Reddit’s Sports Partnerships Lead Christine Wixted Wixted sat on a panel alongside MLB’s Vice President, Social Media & Innovation Cameron Gidari , and they discussed some of the use cases and value props for the platform.
Reddit is a text-heavy platform, because it’s about conversations. But that doesn’t mean photos and videos don’t have a place, multimedia can start and lead those conversations.
Anyone (including brands) can be welcomed when they provide value. For teams and leagues, that can mean content they’re not getting elsewhere. Don’t just post the highlight, post a unique camera angle or clips that’ll elicit conversation.
Niche down. This will come up again later with TikTok, but with the specific, interest-based nature of subreddits, there is opportunity to engage with non-sports communities. MLB mentioned their success posting in the weather subreddit, for example. AMAs (Ask Me Anything) can also be compelling ways to serve different niches; for example, could your head groundskeeper interact with the landscaping subreddit about caring for the grass at an MLB or NFL stadium? (my example!)
AMAs were brought up multiple times by both Wixted and Gidari, and Wixted mentioned ongoing development of the platform’s AMA product. That’s a telling sign! Gidari talked about the success of having AMAs with MLB’s team-specific beat writers, offering deep engagement and conversation when, for example, the Cubs beat writer does an AMA with the Cubs subreddit (again, my example). This is an easy but effective way to get started on Reddit.
You can get value from Reddit even if you never post. Wixted echoed what many marketers will say, characterizing Reddit as your free focus group. Lurk and listen, and, as Wixted recommended, leverage Reddit Pro — which is free, to set up listening flows to keep track of your brand and sport, and spot opportunities for engagement or pick up insights about your fans or potential fans.
You don’t need to worry about constantly feeding Reddit. It’s not as algorithm-driven as other platforms (posts primarily gain visibility through comments and upvotes), so you can pick and choose opportunities instead of stressing about a 24/7/365 presence
If you’re anxious or uneasy about treading into Reddit, where it’s true that brands are not always a welcomed presence, work through the subreddit moderators (or connect with the mods through the Reddit partnerships team)
Wixted talked through some of Reddit’s near-term priorities and roadmap, so pay attention. She mentioned: Continued devleopment and evolution of their video product, improving their mobile app UX, further development of their AMA product (such as scheduling, RSVPs, video answers, activation within AMAs), building more publisher tools and verifications, and enhancing the live event experience with features like live stats, polls, custom flair, and game highlights (my note: just check out the r/CFB subreddit on a college football Saturday, for example!).
My personal Reddit experience (from running Slyke) — the organic opportunity (and paid) is very real. Definitely be mindful of posting as a brand, you may share the same content under a non-brand handle. Think about posts that will start conversations, and note that users are willing to click off to a link to consume content that’ll funnel back into the conversation on the thread; I’ve had posts reach millions and drive considerable clicks. I’ve also found cost-effective ads (but be mindful of objectives). And do your research — Reddit Pro and Gummy Search can be helpful, jumping into subreddits and searching them or filtering by Best/Hot/Top over different time periods, and test different posting formats (link, text-only, carousel, video, etc.). I’ll also note, for a verrrry small marketer like myself, the Reddit ads team is extremely help and hands-on
Learning from the SMSports OGs
Depending on when you mark the unofficial start of the social media x sports era, the field as a profession is about 10-15 years old. It really did start with entry-level staff and, yes, some interns. The first pros whose job it was to write tweets, hit publish on Facebook, and navigate the early days of social media have grown up in the space, many in senior leadership or still hanging around the industry otherwise, continuing to evolve with it.
A few of these ‘OGs’ hit the stage to reflect on the past, analyze the present, and lend insight and inspiration to those coming up and molding the next era now.
“Likes don’t pay the bills.” Justin Karp , an OG now at NBC Universal, isn’t the first to utter that phrase, but it captures the elevated place of social media in any business now. Counting engagements is fine, but now we have to ask ‘so what?’ multiple times in planning add measurement to ensure those engagements and that reach is connected to business goals. That could mean reaching certain audience, driving home messaging, gaining actionable insights and feedback from fan engagement and comments, tying to sales, affecting recruiting outcomes and interest (for college sports), and driving tune-in, subscriptions, sign-ups, etc.
Platforms and what content and packaging work on said platforms change. So audiences. The point is you always have to be mindful of evolving, an insight elucidated by the Las Vegas Raiders’ Gavin Rivera. Learn to love the space as a science to continually study.
There are still only 24 hours in a day and yet an ever-growing supply of content and options competing for that attention. So everything has to start with a compelling story. Regardless of mediums, platforms, and presentation, the story must be one worth telling.
Rivera demonstrated decisiveness, explaining that we must fully comprehend the brand of the organization and know how to implement it across the board. You should be able to articulate the ‘why’ behind every post, heck, every word, and edit. The industry has grown up.
Karp has spent a lot of time and effort to drive tune-in with live sports broadcast by NBC and its platforms. And a key insight, with broad implications for sports pros, is that sports fans have passions and interests beyond sports. They follow whatever stories, memes, and trends are popping in areas beyond sports. So how can you ensure your game feels culturally relevant, significant enough to command engagement and attention by the biggest audience?
Lessons and ROI with Losing Teams
“Don’t read the comments” was never a good idea. Sure, there is bound to be vitriol and salty language, especially in the lean times for teams, but there is no better way to hear from your fans at scale than social media. It’s a constant source of feedback and vibes, in general and for specific content and campaigns.
If you sift through riff-raff, there is gold in all those fan voices and finding those insights is another way the social media team can deliver meaningful value up to the c-suite. This was one of themes at the conference overall and in a discussion featuring social media and content leaders from the Chicago White Sox (Tim Brogdon ), Carolina Panthers (Alex Grant), and Diana Smith (Charlotte Hornets), three teams from three different leagues who share this one thing in common — their teams have suffered a spate of losing seasons, of varying degrees, in recent years.
Remind yourself that the fan sentiment expressed on social media is often unrelated to your performance as a content and social media team, it’s the team performance they’re peeved about. Don’t get down about all the aspersions, but do look for patterns and opportunities within it. When you do something, creating content or commenting, for example, that shows fans you’re listening and addresses a common sore spot, that goes a long way.
What do you do when the season is shot? It’s tough when fans can all recognize that this team just ain’t going to win much, let alone contend this season. The advice for this issue included maximizing the effort around things that fans are excited and feeling positively about. That could mean schedule release, the draft, free agency, training camp, fan traditions and community. You may recognize storylines that fans are interested in; if so, build on that.
If it’s driving behavior, the content is valuable. Fans may not want to hear from you as much amidst losing, but don’t necessarily take negative sentiment or even lower engagement to automatically mean the content didn’t work. Pay attention to other metrics like sends/shares, watch time, and reach, too.
Coaching up is an important skill. You need to be able to communicate and explain strategic decisions to senior leaders and execs in various departments. If you post less, those preseason engagement and growth goals are not gonna be reached. If we want our social media to be among the best amongst our peers, here’s what that’s going to take and why it makes sense. The White Sox’s Brogdon also spoke about high-level conversations about how the team’s self-awareness and even use of memes would help shift the public narrative a bit, and deflect negative attention on the team to more positive attention on the social media team’s approach.
‘Some ideas are worth waiting for.’ This paraphrase, via another paraphrase from the Hornets’ Smith was about not tossing aside ideas when fan sentiment is low, but saving some of them for when the right time comes. Talk to any staff at losing teams and there’s a good chance they have some ideas for content or even strategic direction for when the team becomes a winning one.
Brogdon talked about developing a Whtie Sox fan persona, which guides core strategy and decisions, and enables more thoughtful conversations around the team’s approach. Overall, the panel has a good handle on documenting voice, tone, and brand guidelines, so everyone knows the gospel guiding the strategy and post-to-post decision making.
This panel and others discussed non-traditional KPIs. Engagement is great, but there is so much more value to be tracked and framed. The Panthers’ Alex Grant even mentioned how player comments on content and their feedback as a good sign. As noted earlier, using social listening and comments to drive actionable recommendations and insights, whether based around fan experience [a pain point at the game], reaction to an activation or promotion, or an emerging affinity. Consider community development goals, too. When fans are starting their own conversations and conversing (hopefully respectfully!) with each other, that’s a good sign. If it starts to feel like the team and its fans have inside jokes or their own language, that’s pretty cool.
STN Digital’s David Brickley went into what we mean when we say ROI. Understand the true objective — there is a difference between a marketing and a sales campaign, he said. Not everything is about sales, the objective could be community growth, reaching a specific demo, etc.
Live Coverage and Content
Content producers and leaders from three very different leagues and sports, NASCAR, MLB, and the PWHL, spoke about covering events/games and getting content to the feeds quickly (and why that matters).
Major League Baseball games are full of highlights. They can’t always predict when they’ll be a an incredible defensive play or a monstrous home run, but when it happens they want to own the moment and get it out quickly. MLB’s Brett Blueweiss said the goal is ‘field to feed’ in two minutes, and noted they typically have three different angles to share to make the most of the moments. An over-arching theme was the value of sharing unique content. Plenty of accounts can post the broadcast highlight, but what is the content that only YOU have?
While most sports events take place with fields and courts that are circumnavigable, NASCAR’s Alejandro Alvarez knows he and his content producers can’t possibly be everywhere in their massive speedway venues. So it helps them to be a bit more intentional about the content they want to capture and why. The overall goal, he said, is to convey the visceral experience of being at the race and all the energy and atmosphere of the event.
Both Blueweiss and Alvarez said that data often shows that mobile content (phone-captured) performs better than more polished content shot with more professional video/photo equipment. It looks more like real life, so it’s more relatable, they surmised. Alvarez said the memorable line that ‘the best camera is the one in your hand,’ whether that’s a DSLR or an iPhone. But also be smart about it, recognize the moments where one device or the other makes more sense. Overall, showing the data can also help destigmatize any qualms about phone-captured content that some may harbor.
There’s always risk of montony. Sports are about routine, by design, so content can get stale if every game day looks virtually the same with the live content captured. Some of the recommendations to combat this included giving your on-the-ground content creators some agency to roam around the venue to find unique angles or scenes. And let these talented producers try new things, they can bring good ideas to the table. Even small tweaks, too, can make something feel fresh for fans.
The Perfect Couple: Design and Social
Design and social media are inseparable. The best marriages can make 1+1 > 2, with creative that syncs with the content and copy to enhance fandom and enliven an intentional branding. Every good marriage requires communication, honesty, and compromise, and the discussion among design and social pros from the University of Tennessee’s Athletics and the Atlanta Falcons was full of helpful tips and insights.
Distinct creative looks and techniques are ownable, and can augment brand identioty and equity, stated the Falcons’ Director of Social Media and Influencers, Ryan Delgado .
Tennessee’s Evan Ford explained how the Vols (Volunteers) have creative boundaries around a sandbox in which colleagues can play. This helps maintain integirty while not stifling creative riffs among the school’s many teams. The Vols’ Kellen Hiser (Assistant AD, Digital and Creative Strategy) said that knowing the why behind creative elements and decisions can help inform playing within the guardrailed sandbox and guide future asks, too.
In a nod to the potential for numbness and montony from otherwise awesome creative, there were recommendations about. how small tweaks can mitigate such risks. That could be changing up the font or composition on the creative, or even just the presentation; a new approach to carousels or Reels covers, for example, or a different introductory frame for a Stories post.
Game days can move rapidly (of course!), so it helps to prepare and plan from a content and creative perspective, too. That means scenario planning, so all sides are ready for potential moments. It’s also good to know who is supposed to be where and when, so when content happens, someone is in the right place at the right time, and the director leading the content execution knows who to call on for the content.
A subtle but important point of discussion was honing the creative process from all sides. It can make a big difference when a request or brief is well-written and an informed, reasonable timeline is provided. Knowing how to give and receive feedback are underrated skills. And don’t forget to ensure all sides know the purpose of the creative, how will it be used and why (and if it goes unused, why was that the case?). Close the loop on performance and feedback, that’s a complete creative cycle.
You can win with consistency. Not every post or piece of creative needs to be a home run, consistently hitting singles and doubles can drive consistent impact.
I just loved the Falcons’ Jack Ozmer (Graphic Designer) talk about crafting a team identity that’s consistent across visual and voice. That’s the crux of a lot of this synchronization and synergy of design and social, helping to build that cohesive brand.
TikTok Tips
TikTok continues to be a force in social media and no other platform has been more valuable in broadening the scope that sports can penetrate. The discussion on the TikTok panel was centered around March Madness and creators, and was packed with insights for general application, too.
Search and intentional discovery remains a big priority for TikTok. The moderator of the panel, Kenny Yansen (TikTok leads for sports broadcast partnerships) showcased the key ways the platform activated around TikTok and the tournaments’ hub and search were front and center. TikTok in general remains a major search platform and it appears they’re continuing to lean into that behavior. When was the last time you searched your brand, team, or partners?
Bleacher Report’s Louise Chouinard (Senior Producer, Field Content) articulated their approach to TikTok, embracing a culture of experimentation. And not all good ideas will hit on TikTok the first time you post them. Sometimes posting a second or third time, with or without tweaks, can hit. She also noted the opportunity to experiment and ‘flood the feed’ during those high times, such as during March Madness. Some of that creative spaghetti will stick, reach new audiences, and inform future practices, too.
Content creator and former pro basketball player Trey Phils (and Yalie!) advised to not be afraid to flop. You just have to post. Get reps and try stuff. One of the features of TikTok your content doesn’t get automatically served at scale to users, let alone followers. Only the good content does. The bad content barely gets seen by anybody, so don’t sweat the flops. If you trip and fall while walking and nobody’s around to see it, who cares? (my example there, haha)
When you work with creators, select creators whose style and content fits what you (and the brand) are seeking, said Chouinard. Then let them cook. If you try to force something that deviates from the creator’s content style, that’s not good for anyone.
Lean into niche when you can (and when it’s relevant). TikTok has ‘unmatched discoverability,’ said Chouinard. Oftentimes niche sports or niche topics can over-perform, so look for those opportunities and lean into it. She cited an example of an interview with Stephen Nedoroscik (the bespectacled pommel horse hero for Team USA Olympic men’s gymnastics team) in which his love for the video game Rocket League came up. TikTok did its thing, getting that content to Rocket League aficionados on TikTok and the post took off.
The Growth and Opportunity of Women’s Sports, Athletes, and Content
No sports industry event can take place without a discussion about women’s sports. The growth is undeniable, the athletes influential, and it feels like we’re still just getting started.
One of the content motifs that came up as a propellant, with benefits for women’s and men’s sports and cultural relevance was athlete collabs. That could be across teams in the same sport, teams in the same city, teammates together, or no natural connection like that at all. Numerous female athletes have wider reach on social media, and many are just better at social, even if the teams and leagues foir which the male athletes’ have bigger overall fan bases, for the most part, which means both sides stand to gain. Audiences can multiply quickly with collabs.
Women’s sports athletes are inviting new brand categories and activations into the fold. Beauty and feminine hygiene brands, for example, now have a natural platform in sports that’s growing in scale, and these athletes are creating new opportunities through content like GRWM (get ready with me). Women are, in general, more willing to be vulnerable on social media, which makes them more relatable to fans, and more effective and authentic brand ambassadors.
There is a tangible shift in the way brands play within women’s sports, too. While in the past their activations often came across as patronizing, like an act of charity. Now, it’s more about celebrating women’s sports and the athletes as legit superstars performing impressive athletic achievements.
Fans of women’s sports are fans. They’re often more vehement and even tribal, which helps create a valuable platform for women’s sports. When other leagues/teams or brands engage authentically with women’s sports teams and athletes, these tribes often come with them, and bring their passion and devotion.
Understanding, Activating, and Community Building with Fans
It’s easy when you’re the legacy team account. (Okay, not easy, but stay with me) But how do you become a relevant presence for fans when you’re a media outlet, an upstart content and competition company, or even a multi-trillion-dollar corporate brand? There some insights and ideas with broad applications that I picked up in a discussion with the pros helping to engage communities and fans for ALLCITY Network, Overtime, and Microsoft.
ALLCITY’s Parker Sperry (VP of Partnership Marketing) spoke about how ALLCITY, the parent company behind localized media companies (DNVR, PHNX, among others) thinks about serving fans throughout their gameday journey. From pregame to in-game to postgame, what can they do to engage their fans and add value?
Sperry also spoke about positioning their talent to be brand ambassadors, in addition to how they work with creators. They want to offer fans something unique, so they’ll oftne let their creators try ideas in the moment and overall think about formats that are outside the box. They’re not trying to be traditional media.
Overtime’s Mike Kaufman (Director of Social Strategy) appreciates the platform they have and the communities they can create and serve. He discussed the importance of listening to and learning from athletes (and their parents) to better serve them. He also spoke about discovering communities they can help, using their platform to fill programming gaps and serve those communities fans fans.
Microsoft’s Joey Maestas , a social media and sports vet who today helps Microsoft market its AI as Social, Influencers & Video Lead for Copilot. In devising strategy, the north star for him is to consider what use cases would their audience care about? That guides the creators they work with (and how), the activations they produce, and the content they create.
A few more
Not everything fit in the sections above, so here are a couple other things that stuck with me.
It’s always instructive to pay attention to what the major platforms advise, so we were all at rapt attention when Meta addressed the crowd. Kristen Oh (Sports Partnerships at Meta) shared a breakdown of Instagram’s many products, and how organizations can think about using each. While nothing is absolute, the overview included: Utilize the feed for curated highlights, Stories for ephemeral moments, short and entertainment-focused videos for Reels, go Live and be interactive with fans, and connect with core fans (in general, for specific events, for sub brands, for athletes) in Channels.
Meta also reviewed Threads. It’s no secret that adoption and engagement on Threads is a big priority for Meta right now, and it was informative to learn how they speak about Threads and the frameworks for success on the platform. View the linked image for the full slide summing up the big ideas, but in brief they presented 4+ recommendations to build a community and engaging presence on Threads. 1) Post authoritative content like highlights and behind-the-scenes, 2) ‘Own the moment’ by sharing content that makes a statement or echoes what fans are feeling, 3) Tap into creators and commentators by developing ambassadors and elevating community voices, 4) Drive Community engagement by empowering everyday fans. Ultimately, consistently engage with fans and with the community, and that’ll go a long way on Threads.
STN Digital’s David Brickley cited the old cliche ‘Your network is your net worth.’ But it wasn’t just about how who you know helps you get hired at your next job. It’s about being able to make things happen, too. He’s right in it, as a founder and leader of an agency, but he added another framing to the old aphorism, if there’s a big activation or content campaign to execute, do you have the rolodex of trusted agencies or freelancers to call into action? Building that network is valuable, particularly as you ascend. to more senior roles.
That’s over 4,000 words above. If you made it all the way here, whether you read this in a single sitting or sections at a time, I hope you feel smarter having learned what I learned. Since there is so much, here are some of the lasting themes and insights to ensure you take with you:
Social has grown up — from “vibes” to a strategic, business-impact engine that drives tune-ins, ticket sales, sponsorships, marketing objectives and deeper fan insights.
The communities for your content are broader than you think — Think beyond sports content and communities, and add value to others. Try sharing relevant content to niche subreddits and TikTok fandoms.
Measure what matters — count engagements and views remain important, but aim to tie posts and performance to business goals (tune-in, brand messaging and pillars, marketing communications, community growth, brand affinity, partner activation).
Empower your creators and colleagues — Formalize guardrails; the goal is not to micromanage, but invite safe experimentation, so creators, freelancers, and coworkers can unearth fresh angles and creative ideas.
Content and Social are Strategic — Articulate the why behind the strategy, content, and creative. Decisions and direction should make sense because they align with the why.
Experiment without fear — on TikTok and beyond, embrace rapid “fail fast” iterations; only the best content surfaces, so don’t sweat the misses. You may even reach communities you never thought about
Lean into under-tapped fandoms — women’s sports, niche athletes and underserved communities hold high-value audiences hungry for genuine curation and context.
Somehow, this barely scratches the surface of all the knowledge to gain and stories to hear from the presentations at Gondola. Not to mention all the conversations on the side and the relationships formed outside of the official sessions.
Thanks to the team at Gondola (led by the legend Jared Kleinstein) for putting together a tremendous event and to all the speakers for being so thoughtful and generous and energetic with their discussions. If you haven’t checked out the Gondola platform, I encourage you to check it out, explore the content and creators, learn about the features, and sign up for an account. Visit Gondola
And shoutout to my employer Greenfly, who got several unsolicited shoutouts from the guest speakers, praising our software and service for being so valuable to their content operations and ability to achieve business goals.
There aren’t many casual esports fans. There are loads of casual video game fans, but esports fans are avid, fanatical, and extremely engaged.
That oversimplified reality is both a challenge and an opportunity for the present and future of esports.
Esports haven’t had time yet to build generational fandom (even though fandom spans age ranges). It’s not as easy to attract find ‘casual’ fans who may flip through a broadcast network on a weekend, get exposed at a sports bar, or see some incredible highlights on ESPN or other sports media. And esports isn’t like other ‘sports’ — that’s obvious, but not in the way you think; it’s like trying to bucket all stick-and-ball sports into a single catch-all category. ‘Esports’ spans tons of ‘titles.’ The collection of popular esports titles like League of Legends, CS:GO, Valorant, Fortnite might as well be basketball, football, baseball, soccer, etc. And yet far more people have played a video game than have played in a football game. Some of the most popular global individual figures are gamers. Some of the biggest live events in the world are esports events.
So what’s stopping esports from emerging from the burst bubble of esports in recent years and what caused the so-called ‘esports winter’ in the first place?
Brendan Hall has a unique lens into esports. Prior to trading in grass fields for massive monitors, Hall covered ‘traditional’ sports for years, covering Super Bowls and Stanley Cups before making his way into esports. He witnessed the rise — as investment money poured in and teams were being sold for millions — and the subsequent regression. He watched as leaders trie to copy and paste the prevailing paradigms from stick-and-ball sports into the esports world. And it didn’t work. But every esports event he attends is a reminder to Hall of the high ceiling for esports, if they can nail the right business models.
“Live events are freaking special. It’s where the casual fan becomes the loyalist,” said Hall, who worked Oxygen Esports, part of the Kraft Entertainment Group, parent owner of the New England Patriots, among other entities, before he became Esports Coordinator at Endicott College. “But [live events] are also expensive to put on. And I don’t think the model should be totally predicated on selling a bunch of sponsorships either. So I think it’s hard to make money.
“I think, for whatever reason, you sometimes see, orgs leaning too early into the merch thing, like, Oh, let’s be 100 Thieves and we’ll do random drops around Southern California. We’ll do these FOMO events, when you show up and when they’re gone, they’re gone. [100 Thieves] has been working two decades on building that…It takes a long time to build that kind of community. The one thing that this industry could use more of probably is patience with seeing things out.”
Hall noted the discord between investors anticipating massive returns and the need for esports organizations and teams to build up community over time. As he made his way into esports, he took the community-building to heart, understanding that loyal fans can’t be taken for granted. Esports fandom IS still developing and IS a relatively new part of culture, so creating that sense of community and belonging and feeling part of something bigger is paramount, Hall explained.
“Every month or so, we’d have watch parties, free to attend, just show up,” said Hall, recalling his days with teams like the Boston Breach, “and any fan that showed up, I would just give him my cell phone number and say, ‘Hey, text me anytime.’ And sometimes they’d text me at 1:00 in the morning [about] roster movement. ‘Why did you drop this guy? What’d you think?’ ‘Oh, I’ll ask Murph when I get in in the morning, but I don’t know.’ I think they thought it was so cool that a director-level guy was willing to open the book for them and be transparent with them, and let them feel like they have a seat at the table, let them feel like this was their home.
“I think the reality is you have to be willing to meet your community where they are, and for me that includes face to face, text me anytime, you might piss off my wife, but so be it. Because it makes them feel like they have a place where they can be themselves and they have a place where they really actually have an outcome in a thing.”
The star player nature of sports has been part of esports virtually since the start. While more stable rosters and hereditary, geography-based fandom has led many traditional sports fans to ‘root for laundry,’ as comedian Jerry Seinfeld famously put it, esports fandom has always been player-centered. Such fandom can be iether a feature or a bug, depending on perspective. It means fans from all over the world will watch and attend events to catch a glimpse of their favorite players in action, regardless of which team they’re on. But it also means trying to recreate the franchise models in other sports is a bit more challenging.
But Hall sees such fandom and sees opportunity. Traditional sports see player-driven fandom more than ever now, whether it’s Messi bringing millions of fans to Inter Miami CF or LeBron taking his legion of fans from Cleveland to Miami to LA. The vital next step is to capitalize on the influx of fans, capturing them with content and storytelling that enhance affinity and avidity at all levels.
“At Boston Breach, like the amount of fans we had from all over the country, not just Boston, so to say we’re Boston’s team, well, this guy’s a fan of the Breach because they signed a certain player,” said Hall. “With the Uprising, we had fans in Omaha, Nebraska, because of players that we signed that they had followed when they played Overwatch. That’s also difficult to understand. That’s why I’m not so bullish on the franchise scene.”
He continued: “When I would ask people at our watch parties like, ‘Dude, you could watch this from your home on Twitch, why’d you drive three hours from Maine to come to Foxborough?’ And [they’d] say, ‘Well, yeah, but you guys have Methodz (Anthony Zinni) here and I like watching him play Call of Duty on Twitch.’ That’s a real thing. So the more you can establish relationships with those fans who might not meet you in person, through content, through the storytelling, that’s going to go a long ways.”
It’s those relationships and that community of esports fans that can transform the millions of video game-playing individuals into esports enthusiasts and fans. That’s part of the calculus at play, and the opportunity Hall sees for esports to reach the heights once envisioned. Playing video games is such a universal pasttime and the esports community is so welcoming and open, so it doesn’t require squinting to see the possibilities on the horizon.
“I’ve worked in the NFL. I’ve worked in sports media. I’ve worked in tech. I’ve never met a community like esports that’s been as inclusive and open-sourced. It’s incredible”, said Hall, who in addition to running Endicott’s esports programs also teaches courses in marketing and esports. “So I just think if you believe in that community, you’re going to thrive in the long term because the numbers are pointing away. My friend Chris Postell, esports founder, does a lot of really good research on the college scene. 90%, or close to it, of students entering college are gamers, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. 77% of of millennial parents play with their kids at least once a week. I play Super Smash Bros with my daughters every night, and it’s it’s awesome. This stuff is not going away.
“But one of the other problems I see, go back to the basketball logic. No one owns basketball, right? Somebody owns Fortnite, and they can change the rules, pull the plug, whatever, whenever they want, and that’s terrifying for a lot of third parties trying to work within the esports ecosystem.”
Several different ‘sports,’ or gaming titles, came up throughout the conversation with Hall, so the latter point about who owns and runs these games, is a particularly salient part of the picture. Esports organizations often compete in several titles, but that’s not exactly how fandom works. A diehard Rocket League fan may not care to watch Call of Duty, a CS:GO fan may not give two rips about League of Legends.
Hall faces this conundrum head-on in building the esports program at Endicott. The biggest esports organizations face such choices, too. The way Hall sees it for the esports world at-large, they’re best off cultivating superfans around a title or two than trying to reach and claw for the attention of casual fans in hopes they’ll convert. The desire to grow the overall number, even at the expense of avidity, is admirable, sure, but it’s not the path to sustainability for the industry.
“I love this concept that Kevin Kelly, the great entrepreneur, wrote years ago about 1000 true fans,” explained Hall. “One of his all-time most read blog posts is about this idea that if you have 1000 fans that spend $100 a year on your work, that’s six figures in your pocket. So it’s more worth it to focus in on those loyalists because they’re going to end up spending more money with you over the long run.
“So, similar concept, right? Again, you talk about micro communities. I think you’re better off really focusing on a couple titles, and that’s where they have a lot of success.”
The avid players, the loyalists — that’s the goal. But you do have to start somewhere, of course. The underlying opportunity for esports is that casual fans already exist in spades. The path from casual gamer to esports fan isn’t linear, but the participation and organic exposure to the titles within esports cultivate a natural potential interest. If part of the magic of traditional sports is that any kid can grow up envisioning themselves hitting the game-winning home run or knocking down the buzzer-beater shot, that same sense of accessibility can last well past grade school for esports.
Hall reflected on those natural pathways, offering his real-life experience building up Endicott’s program — through coffee shop encounters.
“Where the Overwatch Championship Series, I think, has a chance, it feels more holistic, like it’s going to feel like almost a Premier League relegation-promotion kind of system, like, anybody can kind of come from the top,” said Hall, alluding to the meritocratic nature of pure esports. “That’s a system that feels like you can get behind, it comes from a place of more common sense, more aligned with how esports fans behave.”
Hall went on, describing the organic but opportunistic growth of his teams at Endicott: “All the Starbucks kids are on our Fortnite team now, because they were working at the Starbucks [near Endicott’s esports lab]. I’d come by every day, get a coffee, they’d come down here to their lunch break and they’re playing on the PCs between classes, and one of them, Sam, just got a Victory Royale last night for the first time all season. Six months ago, I was just bumping into him every day, buying a coffee from him at Starbucks.
“So the casuals, as they enjoy this place more, they’re going to want to learn how they can take the next step.”
Esports doesn’t need to mimic traditional sports to succeed, it needs to embrace what makes it different. The passion is already there. The player-first fandom, the global accessibility, the embedded community culture — all of it is fertile ground for something lasting.
It won’t happen overnight. Esports isn’t built to amass a cadre of casuals. The future of esports won’t be decided by flashy moments or headline deals, it’ll be built fan by fan, event by event, and through rich storytelling and deep connections. Video gaming isn’t going anywhere, so the potential for esports remains as bright as ever.
