Gridiron Heroes

This post originally appeared at the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To view it there : http://www.fwweekly.com/2016/07/06/sports-rush-football-related-spinal-injury/


If your son suffered a disabling spinal injury playing football, what would you do? You would truly value the help of someone who knew what you’d face in the months and years to come. Eddie Canales would be the man to whom you would need to talk, and luckily for you, he and his son, Chris, provide exactly the sort of help such families need. Their charitable organization is called Gridiron Heroes and their journey is a remarkable one.

Eddie tells us the story in this video interview, shot at the Canales’ home in Schertz, Texas. We edited this video to about three minutes. You can view the full 7+ minute version here : https://youtu.be/ntPsirut5-c.

Next week, part two of the interview will discuss injury prevention through implementation of safer tackling techniques.

For more information on Gridiron Heroes, visit gridironheroes.org.



Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports and FourNine Productions.


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Marketing’s Future : Integration (and Maybe Robots)

The photo that accompanies this post comes from a talk I recently enjoyed given by a marketing cyborg named Repcor.

Ok, the speaker was actually a real person named Rebecca Corliss, but she said she likes to go by "Repcor," which to me sounds like a robotic supermarketer Hubspot built to save the future or something. I suppose I don’t know for certain she isn’t a replicant, but for now I’ll take her word that she’s actually a human who goes by the same mononym as her Twitter handle (@repcor).

To get back to the photo, Corliss’ talk was entitled “How to Build a World Class Marketing Team like HubSpot.” She started working (or perhaps was created in a lab) at the Boston-based company some eight years ago, and one of the reasons she loved the opportunity was the company’s fresh outlook on marketing. The slide in the photo summarizes old channels to which they believed marketers gave too much consideration:

• Advertising
• Conferences/Events
• Paid Search/PPC
• Email List Rentals
• Cold Calling

And new channels deserving of more attention:

• Blogging
• SEO
• Free Tools
• Social Media
• Opt-In Email Lists

Hubspot is still in business, so they must have hit on something here. Certainly the second list houses much of the creative work my company does. The items on the first list haven’t gone away, however. Companies still spend scads of dollars on TV advertising, often justifiably so. Hubspot itself does conferences and events worldwide, we found out from the humanoid addressing us.

What struck me is how much everything in the first list is complemented by the entries in the second column. If you do a conference, you market it with social media, the email lists you’ve cultivated, and everything else in List #2. And if you’re smart, you feed the content from that conference right back into those channels to generate more engagement.

The same goes for advertising. I would never shoot a spot without doing behind-the-scenes content for social media, and all creative these days must appeal to the user who can self-select what he or she watches.

And if you’re going to have your salespeople cold calling, you can make their jobs loads easier by priming the pump through top of the funnel content that inspires an “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of you” when your AE introduces herself.

As a creative, List B affects the choices I make in language and approach, even when I’m working on a project in List A. For others in the marketing world, I’m sure they consider choices like balancing paid search with organic and whether to buy national-network TV spots or invest in original online content (self-serving note – if you buy into one of my TV projects, you get both).

It’s a big integrated world out there. Old-school marketing can cooperate with modern techniques to the betterment of all. Until, that is, we’re all replaced by machines. Which, um, could be closer than we think.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports and corporate entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports. He is also spearheading various film and television projects.

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Penalizing Football

This post originally appeared on the Blotch page at the Fort Worth Weekly. To read it on that site : http://www.fwweekly.com/2016/01/05/forbidding-football/

In the sport of American football, violence sometimes begets more violence. I tackle you, you stiff-arm me, your teammate tries to block my buddy, who tries to shove him into both of us, the safety flies in over the top, and we all end up in a heap on the ground. Then we get back up, if we can, and we do it again.

In a recent column in The Guardian newspaper, a writer named Dave Bry suggested we not do it again. In fact, he prefers to go beyond a mere recommendation. He would have us walk off the field and never come back via a legislative ban on the entire sport.

The issue of football’s brutality has found itself much in the news in the past few years. A new Will Smith movie, “Concussion,” has propelled it even more deeply into the pop culture landscape. Bry’s piece, entitled “American football is too dangerous, and it should be abolished,” presents a balanced summary of many of the sport’s injury issues and some arguments for and against getting rid of it. At the end of the article, after determining the NFL won’t give up wearing helmets, he opines, “Which leaves us with one moral option: illegalize it, the whole operation.”
And then the column stops.

Bry didn’t present a vision for what the world would look like when the USA has banned football. It’s possible he just didn’t have the space, and that an upcoming column will detail his football-free future. I decided not to wait, however, because you can only properly evaluate a proposed policy if you consider how it will work once implemented. You don’t want to trade for Herschel Walker and then realize later he doesn’t really fit your offensive scheme.


Firstly, you’d have to think about how you might implement the proscription. Perhaps the Super PAC Mr. Bry founds will facilitate the election of enough anti-gridiron legislators to override the veto of, say, Patriots fan Bernie Sanders, Walker’s former New Jersey Generals boss Donald Trump, or Packers fan Gary Johnson.

Would compromises have to have been made to buy votes? Would existing football interests be able to capture the political process and turn it to their interests? For the sake of argument, let’s assume not. Let’s say the Anti-Touchdown League gets its own Volstead Act, no preceding constitutional amendment required.

So once you’ve gotten the bill passed, what do you do?

Well, there’s a lot of existing football equipment out there already that could be used by miscreants to continue to play the game. One would assume that you’d want to rid the country of those tools. Could you use a mandatory buyback scheme, like they did in 1996 with citizens’ guns in Australia? If so, how would the takings clause of the 5th Amendment require the government to compensate those from whom it took the pigskins, helmets, goalposts, shoulder pads, tackling dummies, and playbooks? You’d need to make sure you raised taxes or borrowed money to fund an appropriations bill for the FEA (Football Enforcement Administration) to pay for both the buyback and the enforcement of the ban. You’d also have to figure out if it were OK to repurpose, say, football cleats for other sports and a helmet as an unconventional flower vase or if that stuff all has to go to the incinerator.

You’d need to make a decision, too, on whether or not to permit entities like the Pro Football Hall of Fame to exist or the Texas Sports Hall of Fame to have football exhibits. You’d think today’s feds would frown on, say, a shrine dedicated to the interstate raw milk sales, imported haggis, or off-the-reservation gambling they prohibit. Do freedom of speech issues exist here? If so, you’d need to plot how you could get around them to keep people from glorying in the achievements of, say, George Preston Marshall.

In his column, Bry identified his most culpable culprits for the evil that is football. He writes, “The onus is on us, the fans (and, more directly, the team owners) who pay the players to hurt themselves for our enjoyment.” The ban on football companies would probably not be too different from scuttling breweries at the start of Prohibition. But if the much more numerous team fanbases bear the brunt of the blame here, restrictions to stop football fandom would seem crucial to the ban’s success. If you decide the Grambling Legends Hall of Fame’s tributes to the likes of Tank Younger and Doug Williams would allow football fans to continue being football fans, do those areas need to be replaced with boxing or CrossFit exhibits and should the memorabilia in question be burned?
While we’re on that subject, you’d need to plan for all the football writers, broadcasters, and bloggers you’d put out of business. Does the takings clause apply to their capital investments? And moving forward, are you allowed to write about football, or would that be giving material aid to the enemy? Might we need to shut down portions of that internet?

Moving on to enforcement, you’ll need to give the FEA sufficient powers to stamp out the vestiges of the sport. You’d need a training budget to ensure the gridiron gendarmes could recognize whether youths in the park were actually playing, say, rugby or whether they needed to spend a few days in juvy. For organized matches, is the referee sufficiently diligent in calling forward passes or is he letting a few too many go uncalled? You’d need to be very precise about what activities are and aren’t permitted in the presence of tackling. Perhaps this effort could double as a jobs program for the on-field officials who lost their jobs in the industry’s purge. You’d also want to add safeguards to ensure the authorities wouldn’t abuse the law, using it as a pretext to harass disfavored groups. After all, nearly 70 percent of NFL players are African-American.

You’d need to determine the criminal penalties to be visited on those die-hards who continued to block, tackle, and cheerlead in defiance of the ban. You’d have to somehow compute the damage caused to society or identifiable victims and make the prison sentences (and potential civil settlements) reflect those calculations. Would effective deterrence require some sort of three-strikes-and-you’re-out law for recidivistic touchdown celebrants (as I unashamedly mix sports metaphors)?
You’d have work to do internationally, too. The NFL has spent a lot of money marketing the game overseas. It’s not the biggest sport in the world, but it has a loyal following some places. You’d want to try pressure other countries into forbidding it as well and to negotiate treaties allowing extradition for Americans caught running fly patterns in, say, Moscow or Beijing. Canada’s likely to be a tough one here, as they have their own long football tradition. Might a wall along our northern border be needed to prevent our footballers from working illegally as Argonauts or Alouettes?
Once Mr. Bry has figured out the answers to all the points raised above, nobody will play American football anywhere in the world, apart, perhaps, from certain rogue lawless states. Somalia might become the world’s leading producer of linebackers.

Of course, you could have some bold commentators continue to address the issue of the football ban, couching it in terms of so-called “legitimate policy discussion.” What if you had someone write, for instance :

“The problem, of course, lies with some basic truths about human behavior. There is a strong demand for football in America. As long as those footballs are illegal, there will be great financial reward to anyone who can provide them.”

or

“The football trade has become as powerful a force in the Mexican economy as any legally sanctioned one. Powerful enough, it seems, to overwhelm any attempts the government might make at cracking down on the collateral effects.”

The phrases above came from a lucid author who puts words together very well. In one of his recent columns, he wrote about his “individualistic positions on . . . drug use (legalize it).” The passages above came from an article that same David Bry penned for BET, but I took some liberties with them. I substituted the word “football” whenever the word “drugs” occurred in the original.
You do have to try to anticipate collateral effects when banning stuff, for sure. Eliminating a violent black market is indeed among them. Would a football ban create a black market? How big would it be? Would the violence associated with such a market beget more violence than that which currently results from football? Would it create any additional unintended consequences? As Mr. Bry begins his campaign to eliminate American football, he will probably want to perform a thorough cost-benefit analysis.

Epilogue :
In another column, Mr. Bry called for a ban on dogs in New York City. My sister and I used to play football with our dog, Fuzzy, when we were kids, though not in NYC. We played tackle. My parents took home movies of it. If the U.S. implements the full Bry agenda, I may be in some trouble.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.


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Scrummaging with the Big Boys

This post originally appeared on the Blotch page at the Fort Worth Weekly. To read it on their site : http://www.fwweekly.com/2015/10/13/the-bristol-rugby-club-scrummaging-with-the-big-boys/

What would the Allen Americans of the ECHL do if the Winter Olympics staged its hockey tournament in Texas in the middle of the team’s season?

The Americans would have to assess how to sell tickets to their games while contests in the same sport, played at its top level, occurred nearby simultaneously. Would the best strategy be to ignore the Olympics, bash them, or perhaps find a way to take advantage of them?

In the United Kingdom, a number of rugby union teams find themselves faced with a similar decision. As the Rugby World Cup rages around them, teams like Bristol Rugby Club must find a way to market their own products, too.

England’s top rugby union league (not to be confused with the similar but different sport called “rugby league”) is the Aviva Premiership. It suspended games until the RWC enters its knockout rounds this week, kind of like how the NHL and the Dallas Stars don’t play games during the Olympic hockey tournament. Bristol, alas, finished a point short of promotion to the first division last season, so they compete in the second-best league in England, the Greene King IPA Championship. They play a regular schedule, which has so far included three home games.

I joined 4,560 fans in attending the season’s third game, which came against Rotherham. The season-low crowd may well have had something to do with rugby burnout after England’s national team had its RWC title hopes crushed by Australia the evening before.

Bristol has additional issues brought on by the Rugby World Cup. For one, the franchise had the team from Georgia (the country, not the state whose official reptile is the gopher tortoise) training in its city, potentially drawing rugby attention away from the local side. For another, Bristol actually loses players to national sides, an obstacle an ECHL team would be highly unlikely to face. Matthew Morgan got the call from Wales, Jack Lam and Anthony Perenise played for Samoa, and Tommaso Benvenuti wore a blue Italy shirt.

First Team Coach Sean Holley doesn’t view their departure as a negative, however.

“We have four players involved and that puts Bristol on the map. They’ll come back having participated in that environment,” he said.


In addition to the experience the quartet of internationals will gain, an added benefit will come from the playing time the club’s younger players will get in their absence.

“That’s only going to hold us in good stead when the internationals come back,” said flanker Olly Robinson, who scored two tries (similar to American football’s touchdowns) in the win over Rotherham.

Winning games, certainly, never hurts attendance no matter what else is going on. Holley may have found another RWC benefit, as well, one that may have contributed to his squad’s four-game winning streak.

“I’ve been showing examples of good practice (as seen in the RWC) to the players,” he said.
Off the field, Bristol Rugby has chosen to embrace the biggest international event in its sport and turn interest in it to the club’s advantage as much as possible.


Program (aka “programme”) articles celebrate Bristol ties to the tournament. The franchise sponsors watching parties for the RWC games and encourages fans to stay after home games to watch the end of the international games as well. Fans can cluster around TVs inside the stadium, too.
To counter pressure from a nationally prominent competitor, it will often behoove a local business to emphasize grassroots initiatives. At halftime of the Rotherham game, participants in that morning’s Ashton Park schools under-13 rugby tournament paraded around the field.


Bris has a mascot, too, to enhance the game experience of young fans, many of whom may have no idea the RWC is even going on. National mascots are never as lovable as local ones like Brizzley Bear.


Bristol’s Ashton Gate stadium is currently in the midst of a construction phase, with the beginnings of a new west-side stand starting to take shape behind the teams’ bench areas. More than once, a kick went into touch (out of bounds in mainstream U.S. sports parlance) and into the construction site. The Bristol staff member who retrieved it did not wear a hard hat, but luckily the excavators and haulers sat idle during the match.

The project may have helped the team avoid suffering from any sponsors wanting to reserve their rugby money for RWC initiatives. Bristol Sports, which runs several teams in the area, has clearly worked hard to persuade construction contractors to get involved as club sponsors. One could count at least five companies related to the construction industry with signage in the stadium, and more had program ads and other presence.


The facility the rugby team shares with soccer’s Bristol FC will eventually have the capacity to hold some 26,000 fans. Bristol Rugby hopes to win its league’s playoff this season and ascend to the Premiership, which will greatly help with filling the new stands and suites. The team might still have to play games during the 2019 Rugby World Cup, though, as it will be held in Japan. The next year, that country will also host an Olympic Games. The Olympics seem unlikely to come to North Texas any time soon, but if they do, local teams might be well advised to confer with the folks at Bristol Rugby.




Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

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Rugby World Cup : a Texan Perspective

This post originally appeared on the Blotch page at the Fort Worth Weekly. To read it on their site : http://www.fwweekly.com/2015/09/29/missing-the-rugby-world-cup-its-a-crime/

Note to local miscreants: If you had plans to rob a house, you missed your chance Sunday. You should have been in Ireland.

You had no idea, did you? We can guess you didn’t because most of the United States likely doesn’t realize the world’s third-largest global sporting event is going on right now. The Irish know, though. Some 89,267 fans packed London’s Wembley Stadium Sunday, and judging by their number of green shirts (and wigs, facepaint, and capes), 89,167 of the assembled throng were Irish. The entire country seemed to have emptied to come watch its national team, and set an attendance record for a Rugby World Cup game. And of those Irelanders who didn’t make it across the Irish Sea to see the match in person, you’d have to figure a significant portion of them watched the TV3 broadcast in pubs for the duration of the match. So that meant a lot of temporarily vacant housing ripe for burgling.


Of course, even if you’d tuned in to see the match here in the States and noticed the green sea covering the stadium’s red seats, you wouldn’t have made it to the Emerald Isle in time to get into much trouble. But you almost certainly didn’t watch it because it wasn’t one of the featured matches on official U.S. broadcasters Universal Sports Network and NBC Sports Network. Those outlets are carrying USA Rugby’s matches plus a handful of others (including the semis and final). You would have had to purchase the pay-per-view package with your ill-gotten gains.
FYI, the USA’s chances to advance past pool play don’t look strong at this point. They’ve lost tough games to Samoa and Scotland (though they did lead the latter at halftime), and they’ve got match-ups ahead against Cinderella story Japan and one of the world’s best, South Africa.

If you do fancy watching upcoming U.S. games at Upper 90 on College or another rugby-friendly sports bar, you’ll want to come armed with some knowledge.

Firstly, know that the sport you’ll watch is called “rugby union.” It’s played with 15 players per side and is distinct from the rugby league code, which uses 13 men. The two sides split more than a hundred years ago over professionalism issues. The American football code broke off from rugby not long after that, fyi.  Rule (or law, as they say in rugby) differences evolved over time. Rugby union, the most popular code in most of the world, finally went professional in the 1990s.
New Zealand’s team, known as the All Blacks for the uniforms they wear, is the defending champion and the favorite to win in 2015. Australia, England, France, Ireland, South Africa, and Wales are also considered to have decent chances. New Zealand and some of the Pacific Island teams perform Haka rituals before the game. These are based on native dances and are an important part of rugby tradition.

I won’t try to explain all the laws (rules) here, but just remember you can’t pass the ball backwards and you can tackle really hard as long as you come in low and wrap up your opponent. To score a try (similar to a football touchdown), you have to cross the tryline (aka goal line) and touch the ball to the ground.

World Rugby (formerly known as the International Rugby Board), the sport’s global governing body, suggests that the Rugby World Cup ranks behind only the Olympics and soccer’s FIFA World Cup in worldwide impact. Teams representing six continents participate, with Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay joining the USA from the western hemisphere.
England hosts the quadrennial event this year, with Wales also staging eight games (Japan gets it in 2019). Whether you’re into rugby or not, the whole spectacle of a huge sporting event feels cool to a sports fan. The RWC’s presence shows up throughout London. Notices remind you to factor in possible gameday delays when taking the train, advertising signs pass along official sponsor messages (and the occasional ambush ad), and people wearing rugby shirts from many countries wander the streets.


The game I attended (together with the whole of Ireland) came at Wembley Stadium. The facility serves as England’s national association football (soccer) stadium, but it has also have played host to a pair of RWC matches. Even though the crowd had only pockets of yellow-clad Romanian supporters, the game presentation stayed studiously down the middle, as it must during a neutral-site event. The P.A. announcer’s energy level when announcing lineups and tries for both sides would have felt at home at a Mavs game. They play both national anthems before the match and have a large video board for replays.


Late in the game, a wave (or Mexican wave, as the English call it) broke out. It started poorly, with different decks going in different directions, but eventually straightened itself out.


A packed pregame fanfest offered a chance for attendees to mingle, drink Heineken (RWC official beer), try a few rugby-related games, and watch USA v Scotland on a big screen. At one point, one of the event’s on-screen messages directed Dermot Kelly, Michael Collins, and Padraig Pearse to the lost-and-found. It was either a prank, a joke, or a tradition and I never quite figured out which – the men mentioned are an actor and two Irish revolutionaries from the days when they fought the English presence on their home island. While we’re on the subject of revolutions, here’s another good reason for the American one. On a whim, we tried the nachos in the fanzone. Thank goodness for independence – you do not want the English controlling your nacho-making. Trust me.
Once the game began, a strong Irish team coming off a win in the RBS 6 Nations tournament (an annual meeting of the national rugby teams of England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland, and Wales) crushed the Romanians. The Irish team now sits at the top of Pool D.

Criminals, take note, Ireland plays again on Saturday against Italy. If you’re taking a crowbar or wire cutters with you on the plane, be sure to put them in your checked luggage. For the rest of you, there’s a huge sporting event going on, to which you may want to pay attention. You might really enjoy the spectacle and the competition, even if you’ve planned nothing more nefarious than collapsing a scrum.


Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.


RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports

Harlequins : Onside with Rugby in the U.S.

We have a special video blog this week, created in conjunction with our partners at the Fort Worth Weekly and Ludisian Legion Entertainment. It's got interesting sports business insights and sound bites from a cool kid we met.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports

Sports Stuff You Should Do

This post originally appeared in my Blotch blog at the Fort Worth Weekly. To read it on the Weekly's site, go here : http://www.fwweekly.com/2015/06/23/sports-stuff-you-should-do/. I wrote it to appeal to those in Fort Worth-Dallas, but the tips will enhance anyone's sporting life.

You look to this space for sports insight. Today, we’ve decided to offer information you can use to enhance your sports life. Herein lies a bevy of experiences anyone would enjoy.

Sit on the Glass at a Pro Hockey Game
OK, I don’t mean actually “on” the glass. One slip and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would have no chance of reassembling you. We use the term “on the glass” to mean seats next to the plexiglass mounted on the dasher boards that surround the ice. In other words, you can get no closer to the game unless you’re a player, official, or rogue Ice Girl. Now, I don’t consider these seats the best in the house. It’s often hard to see what’s happening at the other end of the rink and you may have to crane your neck to see replays. But the first time some hulking power forward finishes a check in your face, you’ll agree that you really needed to do this at least once in your life. These seats lean toward the expensive side of the ledger, so you’ll need to raid the piggy bank or do unsavory favors for the right people. Luckily you have both NHL and minor league hockey options in North Texas.

Go to a Sports Bar at an Off-Peak Time
We all think to meet buddies at a sports bar for the big game, but libations and bar food go well with multiple big screens in the middle of the afternoon, too. Thanks to the proliferation of sports channels and availability of international programming, you can almost always find one or more live games on the tube(s) no matter what time you stroll in. You get your drinks quickly and usually have your choice of where to sit. The next time you call in sick because you’re ticked off at the boss, don’t stay at home. Enjoy your holiday with some day baseball, Europa League soccer, or early-round LPGA golf.

Read One (or Two) Book(s) About the Fort Worth Cats
If you live in Fort Worth and you like sports, you should know about the legendary Fort Worth Cats baseball team. The revived Cats franchise made a real effort to celebrate its history, but with them regrettably out of the picture now, you’ll need another source to learn about the team that dominated the Texas League in the 1920s and employed the likes of Duke Snider and Maury Wills in the 1950s. Luckily two informative books exist on the subject:

When Panthers Roared: The Fort Worth Cats and Minor League Baseball by Jeff Guinn and Bobby Bragan

Baseball in Fort Worth by Mark Presswood and J. Chris Holaday

Attend a Rugby Match
You may not know the rules. In fact, if you fake it and tell someone you know the rules, you’ll give yourself away because they call them “laws.” It doesn’t matter. Go and watch people run and hit each other and then enjoy the socializing afterward. The rugby culture encourages players who just beat the heck out of each other to share fellowship and a cold (or at least room-temperature) beverage after the match. I’m not sure any other sport duplicates that rugby ethos.

Find Your Tennis Racquet
Go hit a few balls around, even off a backboard or the walls of a nearby church (watch the stained glass windows) or office building. You need some exercise and the U.S. needs you to discover a hidden talent so someone can win Grand Slam tournaments when Serena retires.

Go See Some Sporting Event at AT&T Stadium
Look, it doesn’t have to be a Cowboys game, but it does need to be an event where they turn on the video screen. That TV is just enormous and it’s big and, um, it’s really, really big. You need to see it.

Eat Some Crazy Food
Sports venues have added all sorts of Kong-sized creations to their menus and you should try one. I’m not saying you have to finish a 2-foot-long chili cheese dog by yourself (although I promise I would still respect you afterward). Split it with your girlfriend or boyfriend or both. At all costs, make sure you get a selfie proving your gastronomic moxie.

Develop a Superstition
I once created a whole ad campaign based on how fun it is to participate in this activity. If your team has won five in a row, something you’ve done may well have fueled the streak. Figure out what seemingly mundane act has pleased the sports gods and continue to do it until the luck has seeped out of it. Eat corn dogs for every meal, wear the ballcap to prom, re-enact the same one-night stand no matter what he looked like the next morning –– do whatever it takes. We’re counting on you.

You can accomplish all of these feats within the area. Feel free to suggest your own in the comments section or on social media. Please restrict your recommendations to activities that are either legal or totally worth the minimum sentence.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports