Author: siguenzacr

It is Labor Day weekend, the unofficial last weekend of the summer, also the last Sunday without NFL football for five months, we think. After spending several hours the last couple of nights on brochure edits, I am taking it fairly easy today. Josh did send a couple more recommendations my way this morning, which were not nearly as complicated as the text color change. I am taking a little time to review what we call the playbook for Life After the Games. To give you an idea of what that is, there are sections in the course that will call for the student to stop and perform an activity, not so much a game but quizzes that will help him or her determine what they value most in their lives.

Much like a playbook in sports, this document is meant to help the athlete plan for future success. This is where we engage them in the course. All of the activities will come together and help them understand what their strengths are and how to use those to their advantage when pursuing a new path. I have not performed any of the exercises myself, but they fit very well with the purpose of the training, that take-home piece if you will that allows the user to demonstrate that they have gone through the work of completing the training. I like this product better and better as time goes on, and I am not just saying that because I am involved in its development.

I keep talking about the Life After the Games brochure and that is because we continue to work on it. Josh and I spent this Saturday afternoon e-mailing back and forth about further changes to the brochure. We have a section with two interlocking rings–one has the ICC logo and the other Tiffin University to highlight the partnership between the two entities on this project. We just had the ICC logo without the International Cultural Consortium wordmark below it in one ring. Josh thought we should add the wordmark, so I grabbed the image I had and placed it in the software I am using. When I sent it back for his review, he wanted to see about turning the text in the wordmark red just like the rings (J. Henson, personal communication, Sept. 5, 2020).

I think I might have said before that Canva is a very nice software for designing brochures but when it comes to photo editing, it leaves a lot to be desired. This request desired a more professional product than what Canva offers. So I put $100 down on Adobe Photoshop Elements just so I could change the text color to red. It was worth every penny and quite honestly, I will probably use it again for other design work I may do. In other words, I will not charge the ICC for purchasing the software and just keep the license for myself. Any edits remaining will be very minor ones, that is how close we are to the finish line on this brochure.

Thursday is LAG Day on Zoom, and they say you should never skip LAG Day, though we have had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts some weeks, and starting next week, we will push the time back thirty minutes to allow for greater availability. As today’s discussion was important to the progress of the course, I jotted down some action items for everyone to take before the next meeting. I, for one, need to send the latest revisions of the brochure to Josh so that we can finalize it soon. Liston needs to have a conversation with someone we want as our spokesperson for the program and he wants to be able to provide that person with the brochure. We had a discussion based on an e-mail Dr. Tiell sent about creating an advisory council for the ICC that would assist in the promotion of Life After the Games. Her thought was that Josh and Liston should be part of that committee (B. Tiell, personal communication, Sept. 1, 2020).

Meanwhile, Josh is to work with our collaborator on the Sport & Special Event Security certification on a few matters. Finally, we should all provide Liston with talking points for his conversation with the potential spokesperson. My task was pretty simple, I just had to send Josh an e-mail with the revised brochure and did so shortly after the meeting. That plus a submitted summary of the meeting led Dr. Tiell to respond, “we are quick and efficient” (personal communication, Sept. 3, 2020). Perhaps I am a little too efficient.

I have compiled my commentary on Athlete365 and sent it on to the ICC partners for their use. I also received via e-mail some recommendations for our ICC website, which I cannot believe I forgot to mention when I initially did this but the website is live now at http://www.icctrainings.com, so please do me a favor, check it out, and let me know what you think. I think what happened was that I somehow managed to publish it amid the craziness that happened here in Cedar Rapids a few weeks ago with the derecho, but with that disaster at the forefront of my mind, I did not get around to announcing it. My deepest apologies to everyone for that oversight.

Obviously, it is not in finished form yet. You will see mention of initiatives like a Sport & Special Event Security certification that we are still trying to work out. There is a brief description of what that will entail on the home page. Hopefully, we will have even more for you about that later on. Another change involved moving the biographies for each ICC partner. Initially, they were on the home page but I have added a new page to host that information, some of which also needed to be changed. Beyond that, the site is in really good shape. Of course, icctrainings.com is also where you can learn more about Life After the Games itself! You can actually see a description of all nine units in the program. Keep checking back because we will add more to the website as time goes on.

Strange that we have made it to a new month. I guess time really flies in an election year with a pandemic, social unrest, and for my community, a derecho. Meanwhile, I am finishing up my assessment of the International Olympic Committee’s Athlete365 portal, which I can say after a thorough investigation into the content is not a carbon copy of Life After the Games. The Life After Sport and Preparing for Future Success courses I accessed are just brief components of the larger Athlete365 system. Again, I think of it as a sports version of LinkedIn Learning, though Athlete365 participants can gain access to that as well thanks to a partnership with Intel.

Allow me to share some of the curricula that can be found on Athlete365. There are a couple of courses about public relations, conditioning, coaching, organizing fundraising events, and a very prominent issue in the Olympics–cheating, specifically discouraging athletes from partaking in activities that compromise the fair play aspect of sports. The IOC also has a document similar to what we call the LAG Playbook, the interactive piece that students would fill out to learn more about themselves. Theirs is a life skills booklet, however, it lacks the interactivity of our document. Most importantly, Athlete365 is intended for athlete development in general rather than focusing on a specific subset of that development like the ICC is. The IOC even suggests that athletes reach out to a career counselor for further assistance, which is what we can offer them.

I am proud to say that I have been certified for a second time by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) through its Athlete365 portal for completing a course on Preparing for Future Success in addition to the one I already did on Life After Sport. Well, the certificates are officially in the name of William Stonecroft, the name of the character I created for my unpublished book. Will, an American soccer player, gets the credit but I did the work. That is how I look at it anyway. The two courses on Athlete365 are essentially the same in terms of presentation. The instructor offers a lecture on the subject, some key bullet points pop up on the screen, and at the end of each section is a brief quiz to see how much the student has paid attention to the material.

I, or Will I should say, passed both courses with flying colors and have the certificates to prove it. I can now use this experience to put together my overall observation of the IOC’s portal and send it on to the partners at the ICC to demonstrate we have done our homework on this. Knowing what else is out there and whether it competes with what you are trying to do is an essential role in business, and I am glad that got to be able to test the waters and even take on a bit of a different persona in doing so. I believe in trying to make my projects a little fun if you have not already noticed.

I started another class this past week, a Sports Management course about the human resources side, so I spent yesterday focusing on that and now I am back on this Saturday doing some more tweaking to the Life After the Games brochure plus reviewing the Athlete365 material promoted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). My first concern was whether I would even be able to access the course, considering I was never an Olympian. I thought that maybe they had some sort of procedure where you had to show proof that you have competed in the Games. As it turns out, no such procedure exists. I was able to create an account to log in. I took the course called Life After Sport incognito, meaning I used a fictitious name, one of a character from a manuscript I wrote a few years back but have not had published.

The site itself does not appear to be a centrally-coordinated effort like our program. I liken Athlete365 a lot to LinkedIn Learning, which has videos on a variety of subjects on professional development. Athlete365 has a presenter delivering high-level talking points about the subject at hand. The course on Life After Sport is definitely not as in-depth as what the ICC wants to offer. This is only one course out of many, but so far my hypothesis that our program is not like Athlete365 is correct. I will need to try another course of the IOC’s just to be sure, and I plan to do that tomorrow.

Another Thursday, another Zoom meeting, and this is one that I created so we have a consistent location each week and each of the partners receives a reminder on their calendar to attend. That makes me the de facto host of the meeting, which means I make sure the virtual room gets “opened” and I let the participants in. We had a productive meeting about the brochure, which I sent to Josh. There are still a few more edits to make there. Something that came up during the meeting was the potential of our program competing with one by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) called Athlete365. As the name suggests, it is also a resource for Olympic athletes. I was asked to take a look at the offerings of Athlete365 to see whether they indeed do come into conflict with the IOC.

I started that process this evening. Based on what I have seen so far, my feeling is that Athlete365 does not bear any similarity to Life After the Games, but for the sake of performing due diligence, I will dig a little bit deeper in the coming days. The concern is legitimate and I do not want to find out later that the two programs are alike. Also, I am quite interested to see what Athlete365 does provide for Olympians the world over. Post-athletic transition is only going to grow as a topic, so the ICC has a big opportunity to lead the way with that. This is an exciting project all around.

Last week, I sent over the latest copy of the brochure and suggested edits were made then I sent it back. This evening, Josh emailed me with a few more instructions: one was to cut the rounded corners in the ribbon portion of the medal and adding a different connector. Luckily, I can be pretty resourceful, so I cropped the ribbon into a rectangular shape and then added triangles to make the corners pointed. Now it looks a little more like what Josh had in mind for the brochure. Another issue that I am not entirely sure how this happened or how to fix it is the formatting of the three panels to each page. “The centering is off,” Josh indicated in the Word document he sent me.

It is a headscratcher because I initially used a template designed by Canva. Even when the colors switched from yellow/black to red/white, it kept the same structure. Perhaps the margins got moved when I went to edit something in the brochure. I really could not say for positive. What I do know is that I will need to look at it and see how to remedy the situation so that the columns are aligned. I must admit that I like the direction that we are going with the brochure. It already looks good but with all these touchups we are making, and at this point, I feel comfortable with calling them touchups, it is going to be even better. We are that much closer to a final product.

I am happy to be up and running again after the storm knocked out our power for several days. Not everyone has their electricity back, so you can still hear generators running throughout the city. Hopefully, it will not be too much longer for them. In the meantime, I am trying to get back in the swing of things, starting with our weekly conference call. Oddly enough, Dr. Tiell had canceled last Thursday’s meeting about three hours before the storm came through. The reason was so Liston could focus on campaigning (B. Tiell, personal communication, August 10, 2020). With the situation as it has been here, however, it was a good thing we did not meet. I am definitely raring to go on Life After the Games now after essentially a ten-day layoff.

At the request of Dr. Tiell, I sent over the most recently completed Life After the Games brochure before the meeting, where we went over it as a group. I have been told that it continues to look better, it just still needs a few tweaks before it is ready for consumption. One thing that was pointed out, in particular, was that the medal had too much of a military look to it. Additionally, the edges of the ribbon from the pre-produced image I found off Canva were rounded and Josh felt it needs to be more square. He also requested that the connector between the medal and ribbon be separated which cannot be accomplished in its pre-produced state. I explained this to him in a later e-mail. I am anticipating that more modifications will need to be made.