Sports Marketing Plan

In today's society youth athletics play a crucial part of millions of children's everyday life. Children, along with their parents and siblings, spend hours each week practicing to play their favorite game. Along with the practice comes a major financial commitment by the parents in order to get their children involved with the elite sports programs.

Historically youth baseball teams have been formed by participating in local little leagues. Over the past 5 to 10 years there has been a major change in the trend of parents wanting their children to play against more elite teams in order for their children to become better overall players. These elite teams have organized their own teams and have developed marketing plans to raise money which in return allows the team to have the top of the line equipment in order to compete at a higher level. This higher level of play is when teams travel all over the country to participate in elite tournaments that are being organized by local leagues or maybe just one small group of people to make money by hosting these events.

There are numerous internal and external factors that need to be planned out when you decide to host and organize these events. ITOC Sports, short for Iowa Tournament of Champions, will be one organization that will organize and host these events. Some of the internal factors would be how many people will it take to organize such an event. Another factor might be how many teams at each event are needed in order to, not only break even, but make money. External factors will be locating and getting a contract to utilize local fields to play these games on so that a complex would not have to be built, even though that would be a long term goal to own your own complex to host these tournaments. Another external factor is figuring out places for these teams to stay at, overnights, while participating at the tournaments.

There are numerous tournaments that are held all over the Midwest but at this present time there is only one group that is hosting tournaments locally, so they have a lock but I feel that with the correct marketing and price structure another organization could thrive in this market. The local economy is pretty strong with unemployment being lower than 6% (Corridor Business Journal, 2012) versus the national unemployment rate of 8.5% (Christian Science Monitor, 2012). If the overall economy is suffering, especially unemployment, then it would be more difficult to launch such a program like what we want to do. As stated earlier the local competition is very minimal as the local little leagues have been decreasing over the past year as more and more players move over to the competitive leagues.

The mission statement for ITOC Sports will be to plan and organize the top of the line youth sports program in the Midwest. We want the events to not only be the best events but we want them to be family events. The teams that travel from out of town or even from out of state, we want to make sure that they enjoy themselves while playing in our events by partnering with the local minor league baseball group to off reduced tickets for families to go to the pro games at night instead of just sitting around their hotel rooms.

In the planning process our major problem statement would be to make sure to get our name out there as quickly as possible as to get the major teams to include at least one of our tournaments on their schedule for the upcoming season. Our plan is to contract our events with a national organization like USSSA Baseball. By doing this we will have access to their database to get our brochure out to those teams as soon as possible. This association will also give our event immediate notoriety which we need in order to put us on the same playing field as the other organization in this market. Another way that we will promote our events will be to get out and meet with the local league officials to offer them the opportunity to be involved. Their involvement would be to allow us to utilize their facilities in return they would get the concessions from each event. It is also extremely crucial that we have a top of the line website where we not only post our tournaments but we will utilize this type of media to post brackets and scores during the tournament. By doing this it will drive traffic to our website