Category: Mentorship Journal

I had the chance to go back and listen to the audio of the conversation I had with Nathan McCarter from One Championship. It was a long interview, over twenty-one minutes in all, so it involved a lot of starting and stopping the recording so that I could include it in the notes I send over to Dr. Tiell. In the Word document I created, I highlighted points that would align with the purpose of the promotional material that Tiffin Sports Management wants to put out there. I promised I would share a little more about Nathan with you, so here it is. Based in Ohio, he is the U.S. editor for One Championship, a mixed martial arts organization based in Asia. His duties for them include interviewing athletes and arranging media coverage of events.

After graduating from Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, Nathan went to work for Bleacher Report, where he became a featured columnist writing about the UFC, Bellator, and so on. However, he told me he felt constrained as a writer and wanted to take on more responsibility. That is how he ended up in the Tiffin Sports Management program. The advice that he gives to anyone who is considering an advanced degree is to “identify what you want to do, research what you want to do and the path it takes you to get there. That’s going to help inform if it’s going to be the right decision for you.” Nathan also mentions that the industry tends to be full of people who are driven, so being dedicated to the work is an absolute must (N. McCarter, personal communication, July 20, 2020). Again, we had a great talk. The other two interviews I conducted were just as fantastic, and I cannot wait to share those with you as well.

The good news is I think we have figured out what the issue is with the website. The domain needs to be registered through the WHOIS database for verification. Problem is that when I set up the account, I did so in Liston Bochette’s name. My thought was that the ICC technically owns the site and since I might not be around past December, the account should go to the chairman of the ICC. Now Liston is a very busy man at the moment, running for the Fort Myers, Fla. city council and all, and he tends to get a lot of e-mails. Like anyone else, many of those e-mails turn out to be junk that gets ignored. At some point, it would make sense to hand control of the website off to somebody else if I’m not around. For the time being, however, I will need to transfer the contact e-mail to myself just to make it easier for everyone.

This is still uncharted territory for me. I was able to set this site up with relative ease, but it was my site and mine alone. I have never done it for a third party before. There are a lot of nuances to take into consideration and while it can be a grueling process, I am that much more knowledgable because of it. It is also important that I be able to share those challenges in this journal to show how it is not always fun and games. Work is very much involved and it is not easy, but if you get something out of it, then it is all worthwhile in my mind.

The issue involving the ICC website going offline had not been fixed as of this morning, so I informed Dr. Tiell via text that the review we were going to do today would need to be postponed. I do not like being the bearer of bad news, but thankfully it is not at the top of our priority list at this very moment. That would be going through all nine of our LAG units. I made it through some the other night and had planned to look at it more last night, but ended up having to deal with the website issue instead. I mentioned there is a lot of interactivity to this course, so it is going to take some dedicated time to get through it all. Not too much, though.

My experience as both an MBA student and communications professional has been very helpful through the review process because I have a good idea of what I am looking for out of the content. I can analyze pretty effectively the strengths and weaknesses of what is in each of the units at least from a wording standpoint. The curriculum part is, of course, best left to the experts, in this case, the educators. However, feedback is very important for them because that is how they know whether their methods are working or they need to take a different approach. That is where I come in. I have the role of the student taking this course and hoping to get something out of it. If I have trouble with sections of LAG, then others could experience the same difficulty. In that sense, my thoughts are going to be very critical to the process.

This evening has certainly been a frustrating one. Dr. Tiell and I were going to review the ICC website tomorrow but it looks as though we may not be able to because when I tried to log onto the website, it would not open. I ended up contacting Bluehost by phone to see what happened and the representative told me that the website somehow became disconnected from the server. They could get it up and running again, but it would be up to forty-eight hours, which means by Tuesday night. If I wanted to view content before then, I would have to do it offline. This basically means downloading a copy of the content that can be accessed without needing a browser (Teske, 2020).

I like to think of myself as being technologically savvy, but in this instance, I am well out of my league. Extracting information from a website is not nearly as simple as one would think. My fear is also that in attempting to fix the problem, I only make it that much worse. I hate to say it, but I am going to have to punt on this one and push back the website review until it can be fixed. This is not taking a defeatist approach by any means, it will get sorted out eventually and I just have to be patient with that process. For now, though, it is best to take a break from the aggravation and come back to it with a fresh mind.

Reference

Teske, C. (2020, April 23). How to download a website for offline reading. Retrieved from https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-download-a-website-for-offline-reading-4769529

Spent part of today rewriting the video commercial that I made for Life After the Games, based on recommendations from our weekly meeting on Thursday. As I have alluded to before, such undertakings are a marathon and not a sprint. I greatly appreciate the time being taken to brainstorm how this component of the project can be improved. On that note, I am taking my first look at what the Life After the Games course will offer. Being a student has its advantages in this case because I can approach the review from that mindset: what would I hope to get out of this course and can it deliver that for me? It is early in the process but the results seem promising.

The other thing I am looking for in that regard is if the information makes enough sense. Having the right presentation is paramount to the success of the course so if there is something I do not understand, I will make a note of that and pass it along to the people building the course. I can tell you that there is an interactive piece to Life After the Games or LAG for short. These exercises are meant to help the student have a better understanding of who they are and what professions would suit them best based on their personality. I never realized how important it is to align your work with self-awareness until I pursued my MBA. That right there is one of the benefits to furthering your education whether it is through a traditional program or something like LAG.

Another productive Thursday in the books. We had our weekly conference call which revolved around the brochure I created. Some changes needed to be made to it so I made those changes this evening. I will also be working on revising the copy of the video promo that I produced for the ICC. I guess since that commercial has been published to YouTube now, I can tell you that the project is called Life After the Games and it is an educational program for athletes to prepare them for a future after their career. The video has more information and I will be posting it to this site eventually. For somebody who does not really produce videos for a living anymore, I am pretty proud of it so far.

The next step is going to be reviewing the course itself. There are nine units in all that take athletes through the process of ending their competitive career and starting anew in the business world. I cannot give away much more than that because a) I have not seen the entire course myself and b) we are trying to entice people to take it. I will certainly be interested to see what all is in the program. Conducting an analysis is time-sensitive so between that plus brochure edits and a script revision, transcription of those interviews I did earlier this week will have to wait until another time. If there is one thing I have learned over time, it is how to prioritize my various projects.

I have now finished the interview portion of the TU Sports Management promotional material by speaking with Lorenzo Guess who handles strength and conditioning for the athletics program at Michigan State University. We got to talk about his role and a little about preparations for the upcoming football season, which is up in the air with the pandemic and all. Once I have been able to transcribe our conversation, I will share parts of it with you. It was a nice and informative session, as were the ones I did with Nathan McCarter and Emily Egbers. I thank all three of them for taking the time to share their successes with me and look forward to sending the highlights over to Dr. Tiell for her department to use.

I also look forward to sending over the modified e-mail list of executive contacts very soon. The count of rejected addresses had been 63, it is now all the way down to 22, which means two-thirds of the remaining list has been cleaned up. Of course, the number of “unknown” e-mails has increased, albeit not by much. Unknown just means the address may or may not be correct. The only way to know is to send communication to that account. If an error message is sent back, then it is not a valid address. If one doesn’t come back, then it went through. I do not like that we have to take a blind stab at some of these addresses, but that is just how it is. The big thing is that I am just about done with this particular project.

I have completed the second of the interviews that I need to for Tiffin Sports Management promotional material. This one was with Emily Egbers. She is the one who works with the Cincinnati Reds on fundraising initiatives and was part of my group in the Communication and Fundraising in Sport class that presented the marketing plan for reaching out to employees in baseball. Her experience in that realm was great to have and it was nice to be able to chat with her again about being a TU MBA student. I thank Emily for making time to have a conversation, even as she is busy preparing for the start of the delayed MLB season.

In that group project I mentioned, we all had different tasks and one of Emily’s was to find the contact information for representatives in Major and Minor League Baseball. That serves as a segue into the continuation of my review of those and other contacts. On Sunday, I had 113 addresses returned. I have been able to cut that number almost in half to 63, so that is a good sign. I keep plugging away with this and with the interviews. I have one more to go, Dr. Tiell is handling the fourth, as she wishes to have a separate conversation with that individual anyway. I am all about streamlining processes, so that works for me. Lots of things coming down the pipeline, especially with major sports starting to make their return into our lives after a long hiatus. It is a busy time to be certain.

Had there not been a pandemic, I would be in Pittsburgh right now to catch a flight to JFK in New York early tomorrow morning and then on to Tokyo for the Summer Olympics. Alas, there will be no overnight turnarounds, flight connections, and airport customs to go through, but this will still turn out to be a pretty busy week, starting tonight with a review of the e-mail addresses rejected by the software that I am using. The report indicated that some were incorrect, others it did not know. I am concerning myself mostly with the addresses that are for sure invalid. My goal is to continue until there are no more known bad accounts. If I get too involved with the ones that are unsure, this project is going to take much longer than it already has, so I will leave those alone and hope for the best.

I was also able to get in an interview this evening with Nathan McCarter, who has done work for Bleacher Report and is now with One FC Championship, an ultimate fighting league in Southeast Asia. This is a chance to share a little about how I go about reporting. I have an iPhone which includes the Voice Memos function, so I record my conversations with interviewees, always making sure they are okay with my recording them. I ask the questions, they respond, then later I go back and transcribe our conversation, taking the quotes I think will be the most appropriate for the story. That is how I have been doing it for almost two decades now and it has worked for me. Any of you aspiring journalists out there would do well to use the Voice Memo function on your cell phone if you have that capability.

The weekend is just about over, and my review of all the major league e-mails that I have are coming close to an end as well. To check the validity of the addresses, I have invested a very small sum–$2.95, just a little more than a large Starbucks–in software that allows me to take my Excel spreadsheet and place it in their server for inspection. Sure enough, several of the addresses came back as being bad, but it is better to find that out now rather than after trying to send the contacts an e-mail. That would be very embarrassing albeit unavoidable given that many of the addresses have not been made publicly available, leading to an educated guess based on the research performed. The e-mail addresses identified as invalid I will need to go back and try to find a different one and keep going until all viable options have been exhausted.

Looking ahead to the week, I am in the process of scheduling interviews for former student profiles, so those will be coming up. Always nice to get back to my journalistic roots once in a while by asking a few questions, really more of a conversation about people and their lives. I think I have always been more drawn to those types of stories than the ones about fires and fraud. Anyway, I will be sure to share some of those conversations with you once I have had the chance to have them and review what was discussed. I’ll also take you through my tried-and-true reporting method.