As an athlete, I focus on improving my game. Longer string lengths, better tricks, and integrating new more difficult tricks into my longer strings. In any other sport, or dare I say in 'every' other sport, elite athletes attain sponsorship from companies looking to associate with these athletes. Not in footbag though.
Sports like Snow Boarding and BMX for instance, have industries built around them. Most sports have tons of accessories that the participants need to invest in, companies create these items and sell them to the public. These companies sponsor the best athletes in the hope that the new learners will see their logos on these people, and go buy their stuff. A great win-win situation for the elite athletes in the sport and the industries that supply the products.
One of the greatest things about the sport of footbag is that it is such a low-investment sport, all you need is a footbag that probably costs less than $10 to purchase, and the shoes you already have. This is also our 'sponsorship' downfall. The small companies that make footbags have little budget for sponsorship, as they are barely turning a profit. The large companies that make footbags like Wham-O™ (makers of the Hacky Sack® brand footbag), treat our sport like a game, and they gave up on sponsoring the players back in the early 90's. They rely on their existing distribution channels for their other products to get their products placed on shelves of their vendors, and since they don't support the sport of footbag, they simply don't sponsor events OR athletes.
As an Event Director, I focus on three types of promotion. We need to get the event located into a place that has 'built-in' spectators. We need to get the players to the event, and we need to get sponsors to help pay for the event. Over the years I have been able to get our events located into some great venues like McCormick Place alongside a 50,000 spectator a day sports festival, Taste of Chicago (the worlds largest free admission food festival) with hundreds of thousands of spectators daily and Scot Hansen has been able to run an annual event at Navy Pier. Even though we have placed our events into great venues, we still struggle to get non-footbag related companies to sponsor us. Partially because we don't spend enough of our resources, but mostly because we have given up. The catch-22 is that we have great events with guaranteed spectators, but we have been rejected so many times that we have all but given up on sponsors. We are always looking for companies that would be interested, but because our event directors have had such limited success in attaining sponsors, we just decided that it wasn't worth our time. This of course is an untruth, and we do need to pursue sponsors. I suppose we just have to get 100 NO's for every yes!
I am making a more concerted effort this year to get sponsors for my big event next year, New Years Jam 2010 right after xmas. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
Special thanks to Freedom Footbags (freedomfootbags.com) and World Footbag Association (worldfootbag.com) for all their support over the years. At least they have been able to supply prizes that the players really appreciate. We, the sport of footbag and our athletes, are worthy of major sponsorship, just seemingly incapable of attracting them. I promise to get more aggressive on this and I'll let you know how it goes!
Shred notes: 3/4 to 3/9 2010:
I have been nursing my hammy back to full strength, still shredding hard, just not working so much on symposiums and nuclear stuff. I have been waking up after 5-6 hours sleep with back pain. Solution: Sleep only 6 hrs. max.
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