Basketball Event Teaches Management and Leadership
The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, stages two large-scale, high school basketball events every year, the Hoophall West and the Spalding Hoophall Classic. Each tournament is a showcase of the best high school basketball players and teams in the country. Of the two. the Spalding Hoophall Classic is the longer event, spanning five days in January on the campus of Springfield College, where graduate student James Naismith invented basketball in 1891 (“Where Basketball Was Invented,” n.d.).
Planning the five-day event is a logistical maze with stakeholders from teams all over the country, key personnel from the Hall of Fame, and many planning groups from Springfield College all working together to stage a successful event. The event requires both excellent management and leadership and serves as a springboard to begin our discussion of the differences between leadership and management in this chapter.
Two groups of beneficiaries of the Spalding Hoophall Classic are Springfield College s sport management and sport communication students, who work at the event. “It’s a great partnership with the Hall of Fame,” noted sport management department Chairperson Kevin McAllister. “The students are doing everything from security to event management to media relations and some are working with the teams that come in” (Springfield College, 2015). In this way. the Hall of Fame and Springfield Colleges Office of Conferences and Special Events are able to utilize people—in this case, students—to coordinate many of the Hoophalls work activities. Personnel from the Hall of Fame, the director of the Office of Conferences and Special Events, and McAllister all help oversee these students. Overseeing or monitoring these activities is closely associated with the function of management. Implementation of the during-event activities mentioned by McAllister—security, media relations, and team liaison work—represent management functions as well.
Planning is also a prominent management function. The Hall of Fame and Springfield College special events office are charged with a multitude of planning functions, such as making accommodations for the many teams, credentialing media, scheduling student workers and security personnel, ordering enough food for teams and spectators, setting up VIP areas, and coordinating the event schedule with several stakeholders. These are all pre-event activities. The sport management students and McAllister begin planning in September—four months ahead of time—who will serve as supervisors and team liaisons. Roughly 14 supervisors (usually sophomores and juniors) oversee about 65 first-year event management students, who do the lion’s share of the groundwork—seating customers, keeping pathways clear, providing customer service by answering questions, and making sure that teams know where they need to be at certain times. The two head supervisors organize the first-year students by putting them through training sessions in December and January. These two head supervisors also create a schedule of work shifts for the first-year students. Student leader Jordan Elkary, who was one of two head supervisors for the 2018 event, said. “As a supervisor, we need to make sure everyone knows their role and knows what to do.” This was one of Elkarys first experiences in a leadership role and he noted that what was most important was to help the younger students understand what a successful event needs to look like. He had worked the event the past two years and knew how the event should run. In this way, he took on a role of influence among the student workers. He was entrusted by the sport management department to impart the values expected of our first-year students, such as professionalism, social intelligence, emotional intelligence, and a mature work ethic.
The Hoophall Classic is the cement in the partnership between Springfield College and the Hall of Fame. Both entities need to be involved in basketball events to market themselves. The Hall of Fame needs to attract consumers through its turnstiles and the college needs to attract anybody and everybody to campus who will speak kindly about the college after they leave. That kind of promotion helps attract future students. On Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, which is the Monday of the event, prospective Springfield College students who are still in high school and considering the sport management major, gather at the Presidents on-campus home where they are greeted by the college’s president, sport management faculty and sport management students who are working at the Hoophall event. This is the Presidents way of rolling out the red carpet for these potential students and perhaps influencing them to