Rick Burton

Integrating sports sponsorship into the corporate marketing function: an international comparative study

While sports sponsorship has attracted strong interest and increasing investment from marketing professionals, the literature seldom investigates empirically the process by which sports sponsorship decisions are made. Using a survey of sponsorship decision makers in North America and Australia, presents a number of interesting differences with respect to the sponsorship practices of the two samples. Examines the manner in which corporations integrate sponsorship into the broader marketing function at different levels of the organizational structure, and their inclination to do so. Considers managerial implications and the directions which future research in this area should take.

Economic Theory, Policy and the Evolution of Governance in the National Basketball League

The Australian National Basketball League (NBL) first tipped off in 1979 and by the early 1990s, basketball was Australia’s fourth most popular spectator sport behind Australian football, rugby league and cricket. Yet the NBL was struggling soon thereafter and today it rarely rises above the level of niche spectator sport, in spite of high grassroots basketball participation and strong national teams. We review the evolution of NBL governance, especially the creation of a league competition organiser controlled by the NBL clubs and Basketball Australia in 1989; the merger of that entity, NBL Management Limited, and Basketball Australia in 2009, followed by the subsequent 2013 ‘de-merger’ and formation of a new competition organiser privately owned by the NBL clubs and other investors. More than 30 clubs have come and gone in 35 seasons. The current eight club NBL competition includes a mix of large- and very small-market clubs, private owners and public membership-based entities. Continual financial instability and power struggles between Basketball Australia and the NBL club owners/managers have resulted in a failure to devise a governance model that was a long-term, stable, efficient and profitable agreement between either the NBL clubs themselves, or between the NBL competition organiser and Basketball Australia.

Memories of and reflections on play

As the last son of two depression-era immigrants, I grew up in Springfield, Mass., across the decades of the late 1950s and all of the 1960s. It was a time when Major League Baseball and the National Football League dominated the three television channels and my friends and I played junior versions of what we saw on TV in our back yards and nearby empty lots. What has since struck me is the interesting ways baseball could be modified to fit the needs of children (and some adults) at play. In my case, I had two much-older brothers that I often attempted to emulate. However, since my brothers were often gone playing organized baseball or fishing, I needed to play baseball by myself. So I invented a game where I threw a rubber ball against the side of our windowless garage and designed means for determining outs, hits, runs and errors. I’m not sure if my version would have been called wall ball but I had an intricate set of rules (developed and stored in my 9-year-old head) for playing one-man baseball (as the 1966 Yankees) against the Red Sox, Tigers and Orioles of that era. Since then I’ve actually conducted a fair deal of research and determined that no other American sport has probably been modified as successfully as baseball – for the purposes of play – during the last 175 years. Want proof? Variations of ‘base ball’ (as the game was originally called) have existed in the form of wooden and cardboard games plus softball, stickball, Wiffle Ball, Nerf Baseball and, in the modern era, baseball games developed for Nintendo Game Boy, Sony PlayStation, Microsoft xBox andWii. In short, the game’s malleability has long allowed playful modification to fit the era, physical space or an individual’s physical capacity (Burton, 2016). To start off, I examined baseball’s roots, which date back to English games such as cricket and rounders. These two games were brought from England to the United States in the late eighteenth century and, with modifications, led to the development of the game now called baseball. Most origin stories suggest the codification of current baseball rules were influenced by concepts drawn up by Alexander Cartwright (circa 1845) and Daniel ‘Doc’Adams (1857), who envisioned outdoor fields of play with a diamond of bases each 90 feet apart. This was a pre-Civil War time when agrarian America was embracing its ‘Manifest Destiny’ approach to land and there was growing encouragement for exploration and discovery. But as America recovered from the devastating effects of the Civil War, the U.S.

An Interview with Bill Moos, University of Oregon Athletic Director

Since moving to the University of Oregon in July 1995, William “Bill” Moos has presided over what many consider to be the most successful era of the Universitys storied athletic history, overseeing the development of more than

Changes in sponsorship value: Competencies and capabilities of successful sponsorship relationships

120 million in facilities and athletic department improvements. A bold visionary who believes you must consistently commit to excellence, he has utilized marketing and sponsorship, including securing an all-sports contract with Nike, to take Oregon to new heights. Here he talks to Rick Burton, Executive Director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center.