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Final 2020 timesheet
At literally the eleventh hour Central Time on the last day of the month, I have logged exactly 200 hours. My mentorship has come to an end. I could see this moment come closer and closer but I do not think I was prepared for the mixed emotions I am feeling. On one hand, I am relieved that the work is done and I do not have the pressure anymore of trying to fit this in with a full-time job and some leisurely activity. Even in a pandemic, it is still important to take a little time out for myself. At the same time, if I am completely honest, there is a part of me that realizes there is now a void in my schedule that the contact lookups, communications edits, and honestly all the MBA work I have done over three years once filled and I have no idea what I am going to do with that free time, especially with there being no place I really can go right now with the COVID situation as it is.
For this reason and so many others, I am happy that Dr. Tiell has reached out and asked me to remain part of the ICC as an advisor for the students who are coming to pick up where I leave off. Continuity is crucial to the success of any organization and I feel good about providing that continuity to the ICC and Life After the Games as long as I can. So while it is the end in terms of my mentorship duties, it is only the beginning of whatever is to come.
On the penultimate night of the ICC mentorship, I want to go back to the very beginning of my MBA studies: what made me decide to go after a degree in the first place and how I have evolved along the way. It is safe to say that I have always been a Walter Mitty kind of person. For those of you who remember the original story from James Thurber or the film adaptation starring Ben Stiller, Walter Mitty is a man who envisions his life to be a lot more glamorous than it really is. There were a lot of things I have wanted to be well into my thirties, most of them revolving around television: news anchor, late-night host, and of course, play-by-play sportscaster.
Somewhere there is a connection between what Al Michaels, Joe Buck, and Jim Nantz do every Sunday during the fall and business, so I decided to pursue a concentration in sports management in the spring of 2017. I have stayed on that path for the last three years, and yet a lot has changed in the time since. Namely, I rediscovered my passion for communications after seven years away. Why then did I decide to stick with sports management? Because over time I have learned that versatility is my strongest suit. On my LinkedIn page, I recently shared a post someone had written indicating that communications are that link between different parties, whether internally or externally (Shulby, 2020). That perspective has made me see things in a whole new light that will guide me as I navigate what lies ahead.
Reference
Shulby, M. (2020). I have to get something off my chest. We HAVE to change the stigma around the term “communications.” #Communications is [Post]. LinkedIn. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6730213752211406848/
I just got off the phone with Liston, it was a brief call to initiate a discussion about my goals for the future. The exercise is intended to be face-to-face but with me being in Iowa and him in Florida combined with the fact we are still in a pandemic, that is obviously unfeasible. I did send my thoughts over to him by e-mail for him to review and he asked for time to respond to what I put down. I can certainly appreciate that, it took me some time to envision my career in five to ten years so I want to afford him the same opportunity to put some thought into what he wants to say. Liston expects to be finished here in the next couple of days.
The pandemic is very heavy on my mind in these final days of MBA studies. It is altering playing schedules significantly: the Ravens-Steelers game that was to be played Thanksgiving night and then tomorrow afternoon has been moved once more to Tuesday night, for instance (Hensley, 2020). Then there is a recently-published Washington Post article that suggests that even before COVID-19, sports leagues faced a challenge attracting people younger than twenty-five who are more apt to be connected to smartphones than they are the television (Maese, 2020). So the dynamics are changing and we do not know exactly how everything is going to play out. In the short term, however, the focus has to be on recovery from the pandemic and while those in power hopefully work on a solution, my goal is to get my own affairs in order as far as my skills as a communications professional are concerned.
References
Hensley, J. (2020, November 27). Baltimore Ravens-Pittsburgh Steelers game moved to Tuesday; Ravens-Dallas Cowboys game moved to Dec. 7. Retrieved from https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/30401833/sources-baltimore-ravens-pittsburgh-steelers-game-moved-tuesday-due-coronavirus
Maese, R. (2020, November 24). Sports has a Gen Z problem. The pandemic may accelerate it. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/11/24/gen-z-sports-fans/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2DaQyr3Tpy9krAFVbb82Q8kWWfqbqOz82censzAbspwBN9YuQvLh5hqlA
Today is the last three-hour day that I intend to put in for the ICC mentorship. If I wanted to, I could do another one tomorrow but for the sake of simplicity, I figure I will just go with the two-hour model the rest of the way, which means I will reach the 200-hour mark on Monday night, the 30th of November. Not bad if I do say so myself. Dr. Tiell did send a couple of e-mails my way requesting a few more changes to the website, which did not take as long as I thought they would. One was switching Aliann Pompey’s picture into a headshot she had made, I like it a lot better than what was there, even though I was proud of myself for removing the background noise out of that image but hey, 200 hours is 200 hours.
Speaking of the website, as I wind down on this project, I can say with great certainty that I am happy with how it has turned out. A few tweaks have been needed here and there at the suggestion of the ICC team but in all, it serves its purpose: to inform and promote the ICC and its flagship program, Life After the Games. I put a lot of work into the arrangement of the site so that it would be simple for prospective customers to get exactly what they need to make an informed decision about the service. It is not 100 percent complete yet but it is in a good enough spot where I am comfortable passing the torch to someone else (no pun intended).
Allow me to begin by just saying that I hope you had a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving Day. Mine was a very low-key affair, though I did have a Zoom meeting with the extended family late in the afternoon and got in a little sports-watching. I also began planning the transition to a new ICC associate this evening by determining what information they were going to need. In the case of the website, I had created that document some time ago. Now I just have to walk them through the process of collecting e-mails from governing bodies for sport–potentially. If I can get through all of them before the end of this month, I will but if not, it is nothing the next person cannot take care of.
Void of anything substantial to share with you regarding the collection of e-mails, I promised I was going to start reflecting on the ICC mentorship this Thanksgiving and that is precisely what I intend to do. This has been a challenging year overall, I began 2020 planning to go to Tokyo for the Summer Olympics when COVID forced its postponement to 2021. If there is anything though that I have learned during my professional career, it is that things do not always work out the way you had hoped and you can choose to dwell on what could have been or work with what you have. In the instance of the Olympics, I went with the latter and am generally glad I did so. Now, I have barely scratched the surface with these first few sentences, but I want to leave it here for now and pick it back up tomorrow.
Well, here we are. The eve of a Thanksgiving that will be so much different from what many are used to. Only one other time can I recall not spending Thanksgiving with extended family–it was 1998, my first year as a member of the workforce. Since then, even during my journalism years, I have been at the table with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and of course my own parents and brother. Not always on Thanksgiving Day, mind you, but at some point during the long weekend. I guess you could say that I plan to work some tomorrow. I am so close to the end and outside of a virtual meetup with the family having nothing else going on, so I might as well.
This morning, Dr. Tiell requested some changes to the ICC page where Life After the Games is discussed. Josh and I went over the page in our meeting last week and I made some of the edits live but further changes will only improve the presentation of the content so I am okay with it. The new edits were simple enough to make, simply deleting some words and adding others, that it took hardly any time at all and I moved back into grabbing e-mail contacts off the Internet to potentially promote LAG to. There are still plenty of groups to look over, thus I anticipate having no problem reaching that 200-hour threshold in less than a week. The long weekend will be very helpful in that effort.
With the completion of tonight’s gathering of e-mails, I have thirteen hours remaining on my ICC mentorship and six days to get it done. With more contacts to get through and the long holiday weekend coming, I am not at all worried about reaching my target. There is, admittedly, a hint of short-term status creeping up which the activity of finding e-mails and typing them in helps to combat. I also find myself to be in both a reflective mode of what has occurred over the last six months while at the same time pondering my own future. I want to give myself some time to process these thoughts, then I will start to share them a little more beginning Thanksgiving Day and right on to the very end.
The biggest challenge for me will be to keep any of these thoughts from derailing what I have to do. As much as I love sports, I never actually played them outside of a coach-pitch YMCA league in the summer of 1993. I do notice when I am watching how hard it can be for teams in baseball, football, or basketball to maintain their intensity through two to three hours of an entire game. It is, I suppose, only natural for them to let up when they feel they have accomplished their goal. I do not know what keeps athletes going during such times, I do know that I will have to channel that same energy in these final days of the mentorship. I owe that much not just to myself but to the good people at the ICC.