justin's Blog
San Diego
This week I’m in San Diego, California for work. I don’t remember if I’ve touched on this in previous entries or not yet, but my boss works remotely from San Diego. I actually used to do the same thing, but from Chicago for about 2.5 years and then from the Bay Area in California for a short while after that. I’ll definitely have to talk about working from home – especially in the sports, recreation, and fitness industries – in a later post.So what am I doing in San Diego? Well, it’s pretty simple and straight forward. The 2009 USTA National Campus Championship is coming up very quickly and my boss and I need to prepare for it. Not that we already haven’t been, of course we have. But it’s time to regroup and get back on the same page with everything. This will be the fourth year that we’ve run the event together, in partnership with a few others, and with each year the event seems to get better, and our teamwork definitely improves.
I think it may be interesting for some of TheFieldJobs.com readers to take a look at some of the issues that we’re thinking of for putting on this massive event, an event that we like to think is our participant’s US Open:
- Schedule of matches
- Signage for main center and off-site
- Hotel arrangements
- Travel arrangements
- VIP plans
- Media plans
- Web strategy
- Food for participants and staff
- SWAG distribution
- Site preparation
- Staff duties
- Partnership responsibilites
- Sponsor relations
- Budget
- Awards
- Awards banquet
- Captain’s meeting
- Officials plan
- Championship match preparation
- Photography plan
- Championship merchandise plan
I could really go on for quite some time with this list, but it gives you a good overview of the many kinds of issues that we must have buttoned up before arriving on site for the Championship. And this is really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
The one thing that I should mention here that we never list, but that you always have to be prepared for when you run an event like this is that you must expect things to not go exactly the way you want them to. They will never go exactly the way you want them to, especially with athletic events. And that’s ok. This is one thing that I’ve gotten much better at with time – letting things that don’t go exactly as planned go, and adapting to make the best out of what does happen.
All right, that’s enough for today. It’s been a long one here in San Diego and I think I’m gonna go for a walk on the beach. Got to love California!
Until next time, are you playing TheField?
Justin
Posted: Mar 24, 2009