Category: Mentorship Journal

Believe it or not, I made it through over two hundred international basketball contacts this weekend. This allowed me to move through a few more sports. Some do not list each national federation, so I simply skipped those. I could find information on handball and bowling. In fact, it was so easily available that I was able to complete both sports and now am into boxing. When I stopped for the evening, I had written down forty-nine e-mails for the African region, which means I have four more continents to get through. If nothing else, I am certainly efficient. I am also proud of dedicating myself to two hours of this work each night. It is not an easy task, especially when there are so many other things out there to distract you.

As I look up different contact information, I will spend a little more time in this blog discussing the balancing act between the mentorship, my full-time job, and life in general which right now includes the pandemic and an election with major implications in forty-eight hours. I have stressed before the importance of carving time out for recreational activities amid all the chaos. Here we are in a brand new month, one that is going to be especially challenging. How I deal with it is going to define who I am as a person and a professional. There is a reason for hope and optimism, but also a sense of urgency. I just need to keep my head down for these last few weeks of my MBA studies.

Nothing scary to report on this Halloween night, unless you count the fact that I used a chainsaw. That was to cut a tree branch leftover from the August derecho in half so it would fit in the yard collection bin. We actually had quite a few trick-or-treaters around the neighborhood, so we set out a basket full of candy and rigged a portable light at the doorstep so that kids could just come up and grab the treats. At eight p.m., we brought the candy and portable light in to call it a rather uneventful evening. Then I proceeded to put in more contacts from members of the World Baseball Softball Confederation. There are at least 125 nations with a baseball organization, and those are just the ones whose e-mail I found.

As the name “World Baseball Softball Confederation” suggests, some of these baseball associations also oversee softball in their respective area, making the softball contact process not quite as laborious. By my count, fifty-four nations have a dual baseball/softball governing body. Therefore, the entire confederation is made up of around two hundred groups. The WBCS has made it easy to find information on each of them. As a researcher, I am very appreciative of that. The total number of sports I have been through is now up to nine. Next on the list is basketball, a sport that would normally start right around this time of year but with the completion of the NBA Finals just a few weeks ago, not to mention the continuing effects of COVID-19, is delayed. That includes the college game, which will tip-off Thanksgiving Eve (Wittry, 2020).

Reference

Wittry, A. (2020, October 29). 2020 men’s college basketball calendar: Schedule, first games, NCAA tournament dates. Retrieved from https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/article/2020-10-27/2020-mens-college-basketball-calendar-schedule-first-games-ncaa-tournament-dates

I received an e-mail from Josh confirming receipt of the additions to the Life After the Games brochures. He will reach back with edits, as expected. Until then, I continue to go through the hundreds of sport governing bodies that exist worldwide. I am now on to baseball. Much like gridiron football, one might not expect baseball to have a large geographic footprint outside of the Americas and Japan. In reality, many nations in each inhabited continent have a national baseball association. The stories of how the game came to these places are pretty interesting, too. In Tanzania, the sport has grown since a Japanese man introduced it to the locals just a few years ago. It is especially popular within Tanzania’s grade schools (World Baseball Softball Confederation, n.d.).

Baseball will make its return to the Olympics for 2021 in Tokyo, albeit in a six-team format (OlympicTalk, 2020). Meanwhile, Major League Baseball played a series in London in 2019 and was expected to for the recently-completed season until COVID-19 resulted in the scrapping of those plans. I dedicate a post from a previous course to the MLB London Series. The fact that games can be played on an international stage shows that while baseball may not be the world’s most popular sport, there is still great interest in the game. Going through each of the contacts for the sports I have so far has brought about some very interesting information that I would never have guessed if I did not conduct the research. Let this be a lesson to the young people out there that it pays to do your homework.

References

OlympicTalk. (2020, May 12). What Olympic baseball, softball will look like for the first time since 2008, and perhaps the last time. Retrieved from https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2020/05/12/baseball-softball-tokyo-olympics-preview/

World Baseball Softball Confederation. (n.d.). Tanzania Baseball & Softball Association. Retrieved from https://www.wbsc.org/members/253/tan

Everybody that needed to be present for our weekly virtual meeting was and we had a very good discussion about where to go with the Life After the Games program in the next several weeks. Next month, which is actually a few days from now, we will start the transition process to another MBA student who will take over my duties once I have completed the term, which is in just over five weeks. Not that I would be counting the days if I was not tracking my hours against the remaining time, mind you. One task I will need to do is invite this individual to our next meeting in one week so that the ICC team can get him acquainted with the project.

I have also been given the green light to send Josh the updated brochure for his review. The ball is in his court now to suggest changes, of which there will inevitably be some. In the meantime, I will go back and look through e-mail contacts of international sports organizations. I have made it to automobiles, which is a little tricky because the commission affiliated with GAISF has members that are involved in the day-to-day driving. The American Automobile Association (AAA) is not among those members, but that is an example of the organizations I am dealing with here. Mixed among them are groups that oversee motorsports like Formula One in their particular region. Whether the ICC actually will consider racecar drivers as an audience, I do not know, I am just putting the information out there for them to consider.

I had to make a run to Sam’s Club this evening for some items, so I did not accomplish nearly as much as I would have liked with e-mail contacts. I hope that with tomorrow’s Zoom meeting and the upcoming weekend, I will be able to gain a little more ground. Fortunately, I managed to gather over two hundred e-mails for track and field delegations worldwide in such a short amount of time. World Athletics, which oversees the sport, made it pretty simple to do by assigning a three-letter code to each country, much like what is used to identify airports. If you fly into Los Angeles International, for instance, the tags that airlines print and attach to your luggage will direct it to LAX.

Even better, World Athletics uses the three-letter code as the format for its e-mails. The United States federation has the appropriate code of “USA” and if one was so inclined to contact them, they can do so at usa@mf.worldathletics.org (World Athletics, n.d.). Based on the previous research I did, USA Track & Field has its own e-mail format as well, which can be found on their website. Olympic-affiliated organizations are a lot more open to contact from the public than the major NCAA conferences. With Athletics out of the way, I have now gone through four sports and working in alphabetical order, I am still in the A’s. A lot more work to do on this front, but it is not a top priority and we shall see what comes out of the Zoom meeting tomorrow.

Reference

World Athletics. (n.d.). USA Track & Field. Retrieved from https://www.worldathletics.org/about-iaaf/structure/member-federations/northcentral-americac

Tonight was spent looking up e-mails for each governing body for archery. There are 164 contacts that I could find so that right there was going to eat up some time. What made the process take really long though was the functionality of World Archery’s site. It will only show you the first few nations, then if you want to see more, you have to click a box. That is fine if you are early in the process, but it starts to become tedious the closer you get to the end of the alphabet. Even when you click on the page you want, you have to start at the very beginning if you go back. Definitely not efficient for looking up contact information on 164 archery associations around the world.

How I got around this was to open a new tab on my browser with the same website. I would use the original tab to go through my list and then on the second tab, I searched that specific nation and retrieved the data I wanted. This allowed me to click the back arrow without having to needlessly wade through what I already had. The problem is, I waited until I was nearing the end of the list so I did not get to use the improved system all that much. At least I know better now in case a similar situation happens to pop up in the future. Archery was only the third sport that I collected data on, which means plenty more to go through.

Nine-o’clock in the morning seems pretty early to be doing anything on a Saturday but when you think about the sports industry, that is when the action starts to heat up. This time of year, Saturday mornings are when the good people at ESPN are rolling out College Gameday, preparing fans for the next several hours of exciting college football. Performing public address on Granny Basketball as I have for the last thirteen years has involved me being present for the start of a game at…nine a.m. on a Saturday. So regardless of where you stand on the sports hierarchy, you are subjected to Saturday wake-up calls earlier than you might like. It is with that I took a phone call this morning from a fellow MBA student who will be joining the project next month as I try to wind down with the ICC.

It was not a long phone call; the individual just wanted some information about the program that I was happy to share with him. The question did come up about upcoming plans, to which I responded that I am trying not to think too much about the future lest I drive myself crazy. I just need to take it day-by-day for the time being. Speaking of which, after our call was over, I proceeded to look up information for an organization called GIAFF. Josh probably told me what the acronym stood for but I did not write it down and all I could find when searching for information were pictures of giraffes.

Our Thursday meeting ended up being not as long as I would have liked, it was just me and Dr. Tiell discussing the state of the product and the 77-degree weather Tiffin was having. Not quite as warm where I am and it has actually been pretty dreary for most of the week. Unfortunately, Liston and Josh were not able to join us, so our call ended after fifteen minutes. I did hear back sometime later from Dr. Tiell that our spokesperson has been elected to a prestigious office with the World Olympians Association, which is very good news. Dr. Tiell also sent over some biographical information on the individual, which I inserted into our brochure to include this person on it. There was also a brief paragraph about the athlete’s impressive accomplishments.

The one-piece I am waiting on before we move back into the review process is a photo of this person. Several more edits are sure to follow as far as spacing and font size. Until then, we are kind of back in a holding pattern. The list of contacts I will submit tomorrow morning and see what further information is needed if any. I also have a call on Saturday morning for contingency planning as I enter my final few weeks with the ICC. Dr. Tiell and I did talk about more students coming on to transition projects in our brief meeting today, so I am aware of that and will see where this call takes us on Saturday.

Last night I looked up the contacts at the NCAA’s Division I conferences and found that information to be undisclosed, particularly within the ranks of the Power Five–the Atlantic Coast (ACC), Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12, and Southeastern (SEC). These are of course the cream of the crop in collegiate athletics, where you will find programs like Alabama, Ohio State, and Texas, and thus my presumption is that they do not want the casual fan to be able to contact them with complaints about the slightest detail. I can certainly appreciate that fans can be very unreasonable at times but from a customer service standpoint, it is not the best of practices. Having worked in journalism, I can tell you that newsrooms get inundated with calls and e-mails from viewers and readers critical of what is being presented to them. News organizations exist to serve the public, however, so it comes with the territory. The larger conferences would do well to designate someone on staff, possibly a communications person, to deal with inquiries from the general public.

Shielding of the commissioner’s e-mail only works so well. If a person really wanted to, they could find the information using a service like RocketReach. Sorry to anyone hoping to keep their contact info a secret, but the technology exists and is perfectly legal, according to RocketReach (2018) itself. Be forewarned that while anyone can sign up at no charge, you only get access to five contacts in a given time period. In other words, you will want to make sure you know you who want to reach out to should you choose to go this route.

Reference

RocketReach. (2018, August 14). Is RocketReach legit? Retrieved from https://medium.com/@rocketreach.co/is-rocketreach-legit-a3350dc23be7