Happy April Fools’ Day! You are reading an article written for our April Fools’ edition of the newspaper, The Deceiver. This is a work of satire. Edited on 4/15/2019 at 11:59 PM.
While opening your UMBC email, you notice, among the plethora of junk emails and repeated requests for money contributions, a message from sports marketing about a big game. Opening the email, you find photos of the athletes who are playing, details on the time and location of the game and what gear they will be handing out. More importantly, at the bottom of the email you will see, in bright blue color and typed in all-caps, the link to ticket sales.
The sports marketing team behind these emails represents the best of impartiality and fairness at UMBC. The team emphasizes their need to cover all sports as equally as possible, giving each sport their own share of the spotlight. Whether it be sending out those emails that clutter up mailboxes or tweeting updates on games or records, sports marketing puts in the time to ensure that each team and their star athletes get the attention they deserve.
Sports marketing divides their staff into management sections, each member having their own handful of sports to cover. To ensure their pledge of fairness, the teams covered do not overlap seasons. For instance, Darryl Cline is responsible for men’s soccer in the fall, women’s basketball in the winter, track and field in the winter and spring and baseball in the spring, while Sally Morgan keeps up with women’s soccer in the fall, swimming and diving in the winter and spring and women’s lacrosse in the spring. By doing this, they ensure that no team is left uncovered.
UMBC students particularly see sports marketing’s devotion to each varsity team on campus after giving their Twitter page, @UMBCAthletics, a quick glance over. Talk of men and women’s basketball, men and women’s soccer, more men’s basketball, some men and women’s lacrosse, a little bit of baseball, more men’s basketball, and men’s basketball fills their feed, gifs of each team and key players being sprinkled throughout.
Student athletes appreciate the work that sports marketing does to advertise their teams. Tweets directly from the page are a hit, athletes instantly retweeting the posts about them and their team with their friends and family following suit.
“I was so happy to see them post about one of my teammate’s records. Like, the baseball team was losing a game at the time so it really means a lot that they would take the time out of that coverage to write about our successes,” stated sophomore infielder Sophie Base from the softball team.
On top of the emails and tweets, sports marketing is responsible for the UMBC spirit wear and other gear that is handed out at games. This merchandise ranges from ice scrapers to t-shirts to towels and serves as an incentive to go to the games.
Of course, there is a budget for all the gear, limiting sports marketing’s ability to hand out items at every game. In order to put the incentive power of the freebies to best use, sports marketing offers them at games with the lowest turnout rates. For instance, sports marketing finds that it is harder to get students to come out for the men’s basketball games than women’s volleyball games, so they focus their resources on the men’s basketball games.
Besides the jobs that sports marketing performs that all UMBC students see, they are also responsible for the creation and updating of student-athlete profiles on their given team’s website. From the code to the actual written text, sports marketing ensures that each profile holds pre-UMBC athletic accomplishments on top of details about each success within a student-athlete’s given season and general personal information.
Swimmers are especially appreciative of the details that sports marketing puts into their profiles as they see it as a good place to find their personal records. “I mean, they may not have put down my time for the right event, the 200 free time they put down is actually my 200 individual medley time, but they at least have that my favorite food is spaghetti,” explains senior Dory Blue.
Sports marketing should be proud of themselves for the great work they do for every varsity team at UMBC. With the emphasis they put on the even spreading of resources and energy across all varsity teams, there is no reason that any student at UMBC should not know about the successes and competitions of each team.
