justin's Blog
USTA National Campus Championship Central
After such a great night enjoying high quality tennis in New York City, I was back at the work with the Tennis On Campus program today. My inbox greeted me with several great articles about the program in various media outlets around the country. You'll remember from my 2/27/09 post, I mentioned The Sherry Group - this is the fruits of their work for us. One of the articles was an audio broadcast of an interview of our Tennis On Campus Coordinator for the USTA Intermountain section on Mile High Sports Radio, AM 1510 in Denver. She did a great job highlighting the strengths of our program, and even dropped our web address on the air (this was the one thing that I assuredly wanted her to accomplish – woo hoo). After e-mailing the article links to my boss and our communications group, and posting them on our website, of course, it was off to tie up a bunch of loose ends before a marathon-length phone call with my boss to discuss the intricacies of our upcoming USTA National Campus Championship.This past weekend we had four additional USTA Campus Championship – Section Events completed, and it appears that they were all a smashing success. The coordinators that we have in our sections have done a great job working on their respective events, and it shows in the numbers of teams and participants that attend each year. With four more of these events out of the way, and only five left to complete, my main event for the entire year draws closer. And, to be honest, I’m behind where I should be at this point in time.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, that I’m behind in the work I need to do. It’s good that I realize it. And I’m not that concerned, there is just a lot of work that lays ahead. In addition, I think that the reasons I find myself behind at this point are quite exciting – there have been several peripheral Tennis On Campus projects that crept onto my plate during the end of 2008 and beginning of this year. More on those later, though.
So my phone call today with my boss (I should give him a name: Glenn), with Glenn went really well. It was really a, “let’s both get back on track, both get on the same page,” kind of call. We pulled out a bunch of our materials from the 2008 USTA National Campus Championship and started making lists upon lists of projects and tasks that we need to complete, both leading up to and during this year’s championship. If you’ve ever planned an event of this magnitude, you know how easy it is to get caught up in the minutia of the tasks on your job list, which is ok sometimes, but you’ve always got to keep your eye flying at 30,000ft to make sure that the overall event goes off without a hitch. This will be the fourth national championship that Glenn and I have run together, along with our partner organizations, so we’ve pretty much got it down by now. But this doesn’t make the planning any less important. It just gets easier to remember what we used to forget because we’ve become smarter about documenting what we do each year – and, perhaps more importantly, what we’d like to do better in the years to come.
Topics that we covered today included everything from our media plan and event logistics to SWAG materials and our staff/volunteer plans. And now we have lists that go on and on and, yeah… I think it’s time to start cracking down on this job list. It can be daunting at first, but I really enjoy all of the work that goes into it – and the thought of the final product, the championship itself, well, I’ve got a little bit of time before I write about that.
Until next time, are you playing TheField?
Justin
Posted: Mar 3, 2009