Recap The Court

Jacob Smith

Nine years working in U SPORTS women’s basketball. One year with the Brock Men’s Basketball program, four years with the Brock women’s program and another four years working independently with a few internships mixed in. I’ve gotten to experience a lot of different sides of basketball media around U SPORTS, the league side with U SPORTS, the team side and the independent side. From the sidelines at Carleton as a first year student to being more-so recruited while at Brock 2 years later, my journey has been one filled with inspiration gathered from the people I got to work with, and passion to grow the game we love on our home soil.

The start

I was at a Brock Basketball game during the 2016-17 season, sitting front row across from the away bench with my dad. Coach Kissi who knew my dad came up to us, said hi and introduced himself to me. During the conversation, he asks me if I would like a position with them, and from that a meeting in his office ends in him mentioning that they are looking for someone to run their social media and he asked if I was interested.

Me, someone who had grown up with basketball and had fallen in love with Canadian varsity hoops through the time I had been a university student up until that point, couldn’t say yes fast enough. I had never done any marketing before but it didn’t sound like something I couldn’t figure out, so bang I was now the social media manager and one of the team managers for Brock Men’s Basketball for the following year.

From that point onward, my whole university experience, and larger than that, my whole life changed. What would happen over the next nine years would not only surpass whatever I expected of working in university basketball, but give me some of the greatest lessons and experiences I will ever receive. There were highs, there were lows, there were periods of trying to figure out what my piece in the puzzle of U SPORTS basketball was, there were challenges and there were rewards. There’s a lot that people get to see, and a lot that people don’t. Let’s talk about it.

What you can control

Something I want to talk about first, a challenge that had to be overcome throughout working with the basketball teams, was figuring out what you can control, and accepting what you can’t. In the business of sports marketing, and in marketing in general in many ways, you realize quickly there’s only so much you can do and much of your time will be figuring out how to shift that scale even slightly further in your favour.

With basketball marketing, and working for teams specifically, that was getting people to games, but not in the way you think. We were selling out a lot of games, we sold out eight home games during the 2017-18 season and some more during the 2018-19 season, but with how the ticketing works, that didn’t always end up great.

You may get to Friday and see you sold all of your tickets for the Friday and Saturday game, but the issue is, it’s a combined ticket. Fans buy a ticket for the doubleheader, one ticket for both games. So you can see where the stress can come from. You walk in the gym on the Friday night expecting a sold out crowd and it turns out everyone who bought a ticket is coming for the second game, and suddenly you have a half filled crowd with no more tickets to sell.

You as the person in charge of selling tickets can’t do any more than you’ve done. You sold every ticket you possibly could for the game and everyone who bought a ticket showed up, every seat was filled for the second game. The mental battle you have with yourself, and one I had many times, is where did it go wrong? You don’t realize you did everything you could at the time, you just see empty seats where it’s your job to fill them and over time think it’s now your job to convince people to stay for two games, four hours, which is an incredibly difficult battle to win.

You don’t have a definite way of knowing which game someone who’s bought a ticket, intends to watch. You can guess based on the interactions with your promotion during the week which game is more popular but you really don’t know who will show up for what, you just have to deal with the results.

That was a challenge that I had to deal with a lot when I was working with the Brock basketball teams in 2017 and 2018, and it was something that really got to me mentally. I didn’t have that perspective of knowing it’s ok because I can’t control it. I took a lot of pride in what I did and not providing the people I worked for, the players and staff of the team, with the support they deserved really impacted me. I wanted to sell out every game I possibly could and get as many people as possible to follow and support the team, and there were points where I was genuinely lost trying to figure out what I wasn’t doing, which leads me into my next point, the why.

The Why

Sports marketing is a lot of background work. While you may see instagram stories during games, interviews with players and coaches, other content with fans, a lot of it isn’t seen. Making content plans, creating graphics, editing photos to be used in those graphics, writing stories. There’s a lot of hours that goes into making content that takes 30 seconds to share.

With that, there’s a level of consistency that comes with maintaining a standard with the content you put out, and a lot of hours people won’t see. I found early on that a source of motivation outside of your own desire to do well, helps a lot getting you to put in the time that’s required. For me during my years at Brock and moving forward as I worked independently, that was simple to find, the people around me on the team and subsequently people on other teams I got to meet through what I did.

I walk into the gym as a new team manager and I see guys like Dani Elgadi, Johneil Simpson, Tyler Brown, I was surrounded by guys all giving everything they had to accomplish what they wanted to, and loving every step of the process. When you’re around that environment everyday with people who have experience in varsity basketball and what it takes, it’s simple to soak in how they operate and want to give the same energy and effort.

The veterans on the men’s basketball team set the standard for how you come in and work everyday, and for someone who wasn’t playing or coaching, I still felt like I owed it to the guys to give that same effort for them and do everything I could for them in my craft.

When I got to the women’s team the following year, that source of motivation of working around incredible dedicated people continued. I’m taking my first step into really working in women’s basketball outside of occasionally helping out the year before on the women’s social media side of things, and I am incredibly nervous.

Coach Mike Rao tells me in August of 2018 that he wants me to come over from the men’s program to the women’s program with him and work with him. I instantly say yes because that sounds awesome but I am also incredibly nervous. The promotional team WEAREREADY that I worked under the previous year managing social media for the men’s team was getting disbanded and I had no idea what I would be allowed to do and not allowed to do. At the time I was going into a new team as primarily a team manager and I wasn’t sure what social media I would be allowed to do if any.

I didn’t know how the team would accept me. The coach was familiar with me but outside of that I only had one year of working with either of the basketball teams so I was pretty sure nobody else knew who I was. I eventually found out that I would still be able to do social media but working under the school’s marketing department, so that gave me a level of comfort in knowing what my role is, but I still really wanted to make a good impression because I had the mindset that none of the players had any reason to trust me or feel confident in me being responsible for their promotion.

I wanted to be sure that they could almost take me seriously, the best way I could explain it. Past making a good first impression, I wanted everyone to know that I want to do everything I can and they are in good hands. I knew the best way to do that was to work incredibly hard, and that meant the hours I spent on my work the season before, increased.

This realization started what was the most important year of my time working in women’s basketball. I put more time in than I ever had in my life, I made sacrifices personally, to put more into my professional life, and I can look back after and say it was all worth it and I would do it again, because I had the greatest source of motivation I could’ve had.

I mentioned earlier that I was nervous about how the team would accept me, and I ended up having every bit of anxiety around that, eased immediately. I learned quickly that I was walking in to a team of some of the most incredible people I had ever met. That source of motivation from the people around me came as easy as I could ever ask for. I look around the gym and I see people like Melissa Tatti who’s managing her own successful business outside of being a full time student athlete, Jessica Morris who sets an example for everyone with how she sets herself to what she wants to do, Kristin Gallant who works really hard while enjoying every moment, Allie Columbus who is one of the most caring I’ve ever met. I see so many people adding different things to the team, and I see a group of individuals that make it really easy to want to give everything for them.

Many many times that season I would get to campus at 7am and leave on the 11:15pm bus, spending every hour outside of classes and practice in the office at the back of Walker Sports Complex working on different content ideas and planning things. I went to class in the morning, went to the office to work, went to practice at 4, left practice at 6, went back up to the office, grabbed dinner in the market at 7 and worked until 11pm, every day of the week, and it never felt like work because every day the thing I had in mind was doing everything I possibly could for the greatest group of humans I had been around.

You take motivation from many different places depending on your situation, for me it was the people I met and the people I got the opportunity to work with. I wanted to do everything I could so the people I worked with and saw everyday in practice, got the best they could get. As I graduated and started to work from home and eventually independently, there was a natural disconnect between me and the teams due to not being around physically, and with that came more mental battles, believing that people still cared about what I did.

Establishing an independent name

Going from the COVID-19 year onward, I was no longer technically a part of the team when it comes to their day-to-day activities and I was starting to transition to being an independent journalist/reporter/marketer. I was entering myself into the bigger world of U SPORTS women’s basketball from just doing Brock, and I didn’t know how I was going to do that or if anyone outside of Brock was going to care.

I didn’t know what my lane would be in U SPORTS women’s basketball marketing, I just knew I would try and continue doing the same thing but in a broader scope, and hope that people caught on.

I really had no idea if anyone outside of Brock would view what I did as a good thing when I’m not attached to the Brock Basketball brand and just doing things from my own social media account. There was a lot of unknowns in terms of what would and wouldn’t catch on, and no real plan for what I was going to start doing when, just start doing it and see what happens.

That period of when U SPORTS basketball picked back up again in the 2021-22 academic year, until now, working with the mindset of just keep doing what you know you can do has brought me incredible memories and opportunities that I will hold onto forever. Through different internship and contract opportunities, and following a content plan on my own social media, I got to keep doing what I loved, providing the best for all the incredible people I meet in U SPORTS women’s basketball, on a larger league-wide scale.

This leads into the final lesson I want to talk about that I have learned over the years, and that is over time doing the same thing you’ll gain confidence and you need to hold onto that to keep pushing forward.

Trust yourself

Something I have always had a problem with is trusting myself and my work. I always hold myself to an incredibly high standard when it comes to the content I put out and the work I do. With that comes not only a constant effort to make everything better, but also a small lack of trust in what I was doing, despite knowing it was working and people appreciated it.

I would miss posting a final score for one game during the season and beat myself up over it for the week until the next set of games. I would have a grammatical error in one of my articles and question how I could let that happen. I would format a graphic wrong and think I was letting people down putting out incorrect content. I was my harshest critic by a long shot but it was because I didn’t trust my abilities.

I didn’t trust that what I was doing was the same thing I had been doing for years prior. I didn’t trust that I knew what I was doing and it really wasn’t a big deal if a word was spelled wrong or a graphic made slightly wrong. I didn’t give myself the grace of making a mistake and that is probably the biggest lesson I have learned over the past 9 years.

Now, as I go into year 10, I have finally reached a point where I feel like I am happy with what I’ve done and what I’ve built. I can look past the small mistakes and look at what I’ve accomplished with pride. I can be proud of building up my own page and the hours that went into it. I can be proud of always trying to be as reliable as I possibly could, and I can be proud feeling like I have accomplished the saying I wrote on the office wall during the 2018-19 season, leave it in a better place than when you found it.

The challenges, the moments, the hours behind the scenes, it’s all worth it because it helped the people I worked for.