By Kenny Berkowitz

Kenny Berkowitz is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management. He can be reached at: kb@MomentumMedia.com.

During the 2005-06 women's basketball season, the University of Maryland averaged 4,800 fans for its home games. The following year, the Terps nearly doubled their attendance, averaging 9,500 spectators per game, and set a school record by drawing more than 150,000 fans over the course of the regular season.

How did they do it? The short answer--winning the 2006 NCAA Division I national title--only tells part of the story. "Winning helps tremendously," says Nick Lofaro, Associate Director of Sports Marketing at Maryland. "The spike of our ticket sales and attendance figures clearly shows that. But our attendance had been climbing steadily for six years, even before we won the national championship.

"Over the last few years, we've focused on using new media to reach young girls and building a family atmosphere," he continues. "Then, after we won the national championship, we shifted our timing. We knew we'd reached a peak in interest for Maryland women's basketball, so we locked in current prices and put tickets on sale right then. Over the next two months, we sold 3,000 new season tickets, and before the push was done, we'd tripled our season ticket base from the previous year."

Even if winning a national championship isn't in your team's future, increasing attendance can be. Using a combination of grassroots marketing and new technology, many schools are putting more emphasis on marketing women's basketball, with impressive results.

THE RIGHT TARGET
Mary Eiland, Associate Director of Promotions and Events at the NCAA, says there are two key factors to promoting the game. One is to market it differently than men's basketball. The other is to understand the target audience.

"There are always going to be comparisons between men's and women's basketball, and there are always difficulties when marketers are expected to compete with the men's game," says Eiland. "We feel strongly that each game is unique unto itself and has its own positives, but you can't promote them the same way."

According to the NCAA's latest demographic research, fans are drawn to the athletic skills, integrity, and high level of sportsmanship in women's basketball. They attend games because student-athletes are good role models for young children, and the event provides high-quality family entertainment at a great value.

"In women's basketball, the greatest return on our investment will come from the grassroots," Eiland says. "Our job is to get folks to understand the value of women's basketball, and our research shows us the best way to accomplish that is to target our message to families with young children."

At the University of North Carolina-Asheville, Erin Punter, Director of Corporate Sponsorships, Marketing, and Promotions, agrees. "With the women's game, it's a different audience that we hope to reach," she says. "We focus on trying to connect with families--especially families with young girls who might consider coming to our camp as well as to our games."

CREATING BONDS
To create that family-friendly tone at UNC-Asheville, elementary school-aged girls are invited to help rebound during warmups and two or three are chosen to watch the game from the bench, where they hand out water bottles during timeouts. Many of the girls are already familiar with the players, either through attending the program's basketball camp or by participating in the team's kids club, but any girl can come onto the court--and bring her friends. "We don't just want them to be spectators," says Punter. "We want them to be part of the game."

To strengthen those bonds, UNC-Asheville holds camp reunion days to keep the girls connected to their student-athlete counselors and the coaches. They're also invited to attend pregame parties, a family-oriented version of basketball tailgating. And during a preseason event called "Jammin' at the Justice," young girls play five-on-five basketball games against the Bulldogs.

Maryland offers its fans a ton of kid-friendly in-game activities. During "I Scream for Ice Cream," the PA announcer cues kids to scream as loud and as long as they can while cameras scan the crowd to find the most vocal fan, who receives free ice cream delivered by the team mascot. In "Shell Shuffles," a 60-second animation on the Jumbotron, three spinning turtles pass a basketball back and forth, hiding it under their shells as fans try to follow its movement and guess where it ended up. For Maryland's game against North Carolina, marketers taped glowsticks to the back of every seat in the arena and turned out the lights until the start of introductions, when players were greeted by 18,000 waving lights.

The University of Wyoming has been steadily increasing its attendance through fan-player interaction. "Our greatest success has been in making our student-athletes very accessible," says Jennifer Kost, Assistant Athletic Director for Marketing. "We don't want our fans to see players up on a pedestal. We want them seen as friendly, human, and very approachable.

"After every game, our players sign autographs--even after a loss" she continues. "They're very down to earth, and they have a great attitude, which goes a long way in creating the kind of family atmosphere we want at our games."

Wyoming also makes some of its contests part of a bigger event. Ten years ago, it began holding a pregame "Take a Kid to the Game" carnival, with a host of games in a safe, family-friendly environment. "For buying a ticket to the game, fans can play just about any carnival game you can think of," says Kost. "We bake our own cakes and give away prizes from local merchants. After starting extremely small, we've grown to the point where we now have buses full of junior basketball teams coming from all around the area."

In the last few years, Wyoming has started promoting a program for hosting girls' birthday parties. "We only do them at women's basketball games, and they've become a huge hit," says Kost. "There's a flat fee for the first 10 children covering reserved seats, a happy birthday announcement over the PA, and gift bags for all the kids. Before the game, kids take a tour of the locker room and meet the players during shoot-around. They also participate in on-court promotions during the game and have balloons, pizza, and cupcakes delivered to their seats by the mascot."

PART OF THE COMMUNITY
Along with welcoming families to your arena, demonstrating your program's commitment to the surrounding community can work wonders. This means making both your coach and student-athletes very visible.

"It's important for the coach to get out in the community," says Mary Pink, Assistant Athletics Director for Marketing and Promotions at Iowa State University and President of the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators (NACMA). "As soon as Head Coach Bill Fennelly arrived here, he began doing anything and everything to create a buzz for women's basketball. He really reached out to the community, speaking at every local organization that invited him. And once people met him, they started coming to the games, because they'd made a personal connection with him."

Texas A&M University Head Coach Gary Blair does the same. "Coach Blair is extremely good at going out into the community and talking to as many groups as possible," says Texas A&M Marketing Manager Rob Stewart. "This includes doing interviews on the radio and appearing on TV. He will sometimes go on the radio saying he has a few extra tickets to the next game, and he'll give them away to the first people who stop by his house.

"Your coaches need to talk about ticket sales at every press conference, interview, or personal appearance," Stewart continues. "They need to show that filling the stands is a top priority."

Wyoming sends its women's basketball team to area elementary schools, where student-athletes read books to children. The team hosts a series of promotions to benefit local and national causes, starting with an annual "Teddy Bear Toss." "At one of our December games, we encourage fans to bring teddy bears to give to our police, highway patrol, and sheriff's department so the officers can use them to help calm children in distress," says Kost. "The very first year, we collected over 250 teddy bears. It's gotten bigger and bigger every year since."

Wyoming also works with local charities, giving out free tickets to the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and a local home for at-risk youth. But instead of absorbing the cost, the athletic department has enlisted a corporate sponsor to underwrite the giveaways.

"We've moved away from just handing out tickets, because we don't want to devalue our product," says Kost. "So for our Saturday conference games, we have a promotion called Pepsi Kids Days, where we give away tickets to troubled youth. They receive the tickets for free, but technically, we're not giving them away because Pepsi has paid for them. We proposed the idea, and Pepsi was very supportive."

Another effective venture for Wyoming has been a Walk for Women to benefit the local affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, which allows the team to appeal to a rarely targeted demographic: community members who don't ordinarily care about collegiate athletics. "Partnering with an organization like that really hits close to home because most people know someone who has gone through cancer treatment, and thus it opens the door to a wider fan base," says Kost.

"When people see that the program is committed to making the community better, they're more apt to come to a game," she continues. "The people who come to our Walk for Women aren't our everyday ticket holders, which shows that we've tapped into a new market."

USING NEW MEDIA
While traditional grassroots efforts make up much of the marketing for women's basketball, that doesn't mean technology can't play a role. Maryland has found that new media can be the perfect way to reach more audiences at a low cost.

To start, the Maryland women's basketball office sends voicemail messages from Head Coach Brenda Freese to potential ticket buyers. It also uses a pop-up image of Freese on the team's Web site to direct traffic toward online season ticket sales and embeds an interactive 60-second video onto its Web site to pump up fans for the coming season. With a few clicks, fans can download the pump-up video to their iPods, add it to their MySpace pages, and e-mail it to friends.

These efforts help turn ordinary fans into spokespeople for the program. "We're trying to focus on viral marketing--instead of pushing our marketing message to people, we're getting fans to pull it from us," Lofaro says. "They're coming to our Web site, watching this video, and doing the marketing for us by spreading our message virally.

"The people in our demographic--young girls who play basketball--are very savvy in using technology," he continues. "So with a few clicks, they can put us on their social networking page and pass our message to their friends. And we have a full reporting system that shows us how well it's spreading."

Texas A&M uses new media to reach its student fans. Following the advice of one of its marketing students, the athletic department installed screen savers advertising upcoming games in the school's computer labs. But it relies on a lot of old-fashioned ideas as well for its student promotions, including posting fliers around campus, stationing placards at busy intersections, placing schedule cards on dining hall tables, and using megaphones to advertise games from moving pickup trucks. For added impact, the women's basketball team has shot hoops outside the student union, inviting passersby to join them, and the department has hired students to write messages on classroom chalkboards.

ALL TOGETHER
Whether it's students or young girls or families in the stands, the key for selling women's basketball is to create a community atmosphere. "We want all our fans, young and old, to feel they're an essential part of the game," says Stewart. "They're not there just to watch, they're there to be an important element of the program's success."

"If our fans feel connected to our student-athletes, they'll invite their friends to the next game," says Punter. "They'll keep coming back because the experience is so meaningful. We do everything we can to create those personal relationships and build a family for women's basketball."

Sidebar: Thinking Small
Even with a limited staff, you can still pull off all the new and exciting ideas for promoting women's basketball. At Bryant University, Director of Marketing and Promotions Mark Hodgkin has started the Sports Marketing Association, a group of student interns who receive neither pay nor class credit but a lot of hands-on experience in promotions.

"At the start of the last school year, I visited a handful of classes to give a five-minute talk about the Sports Marketing Association and invite students to apply for a spot in the group," Hodgkin says. "Because we have a strong business program with a lot of marketing and communications majors, it wasn't a hard sell. In fact, many more applications came in than I expected, and that was all I had to do to build a staff."

That first year, Hodgkin gathered a team of 13 student interns who designed posters, wrote press releases, updated the department's Web site, and posted information on social networking sites. They helped do Hodgkin's leg work too, distributing fliers, posters, and table cards around campus. On women's basketball game days, they took charge of greeting alumni and running half-time promotions.

"They also provide a lot of word-of-mouth advertising," says Hodgkin. "Everybody jokes about our army of interns, but at a small campus, if you have 13 people working with you, the word of mouth is incredibly powerful."

For a 2007 doubleheader against rival Bentley College, Bryant took a two-pronged approach, reaching both students and the community. To appeal to the college crowd, promoters flooded the campus with a "Come Early, Stay Late, Wear Black" campaign, offering anyone wearing black at the game a chance to win a flat screen HDTV. To reach the surrounding communities, there was a youth basketball game, a children's birthday party, and several weeks of advance press in the local media.

The result: the school's largest crowd ever. Over 1,450 fans came to the women's game, and 2,600 filled the arena for the men's game before Bryant started turning spectators away. "The whole week running up to the game, there was a sense of excitement," says Hodgkin. "We had a very diverse group of fans, with students sitting on one side and community members, faculty, and staff on the other."

The lesson, says Hodgkin, is that even a small staff working in between classes, meals, and studying can bring big results. "Ask yourself what it would take to make some small steps," advises Hodgkin, who plans to expand the Sports Marketing Association in the future. "Make a list to determine what it would cost to focus on women's basketball for a couple of hours a week--a list of five ideas is a great place to start. And once you do that, you'll realize there are a lot of worthwhile promotions you can organize in a short period of time."

FEEDBACK:

Great article-more needed now than ever: the HS winter sport scene has had a change (boys and girls moving to same season-I know its common, but not in Mich!). Attendance is down, there are fewer Friday prime times, and we are trying specials to get student and community support back. Any future ideas/articles would be absorbed!!
Ken Erny, C.A.A.
Athletic Director
Fruitport High School