TIME FOR A CHANGE OF APPROACH FROM CORPORATE SPONSORS

I have always lamented the disproportionate spending by sponsors on sports in Jamaica and as the year ends I want to reiterate how important it is for Corporate sponsors to invest more in developing athletes as opposing to paying to ride the bandwagon. Earlier this month, Alia Atkinson became the first black woman to hold a world swimming title and the first black woman in 40 years to hold a world record.

Atkinson, who recently turned 26,  had been struggling for years to find the kind of financial support that would allow her to fully focus on improving her performances in the pool. For years she toiled hard making incremental improvements but still sponsors shied away from her. Imagine if they had had her back years ago when her obvious talent had begin to show ?

Spending marketing dollars supporting an athlete is a risk. One can never tell how much of a success an athlete is going to become so one has to be careful where one spends those valuable dollars but from my observations that has not been the case in Jamaica. In this country many a sponsorship/marketing manager only spends on sports they know or like. That is why the same sports get more than the lion’s share of support while others continue to feed off mere scraps or in the case of sports like volleyball, virtually nothing at all.

The Jamaica Volleyball Association – within the same time span as Alia’s world record performance – saw another successful staging of its primary-level volleyball competition in which more than 80 schools from across the island participated and more than 100 expressed an interest in. Yet the competition ran its course without a single sponsor. It is common knowledge that if you capture the youth market early, those youth tend to stay with you throughout the course of their lives. They represent potential customers/clients of the future. That and the fact that volleyball is the second most popular sport in the world makes sponsors steering clear of the sport mind boggling.

Rugby League is also another sport that is growing rapidly across the globe and which Jamaicans are good at yet sponsors treat it like it is cancer-stricken. This, despite over the past decade there have been the emergence of a high school and collegiate league as well as a semi-professional league.Games are now attracting as many as 1000 spectators so it would make sense for a sponsor to get in early and capture a piece of that market and reap the benefits in a few years’ time.

But it’s not just certain sports that are being ignored. Certain schools are being ignored as well. Primary and high school netball and track and field are among the overlooked. All I will ask potential sponsors to do is ask where did Usain Bolt, Veronica Campbell-Brown, Shelly-Ann Frazer-Pryce, and Nesta Carter compete as children – primary and prep school championships?

Look, I know times are hard and every dollar must be carefully managed but throwing all the money at the same sports does little to develop the vast amounts of talent that exists on this special island of ours. This year Jamaica sent athletes to the Commonwealth Fencing Championships where one won a silver medal, and the others came within touching distance. A Jamaican set a world record in the pool, and a Jamaican rugby league player was honoured overseas. There is much more of that talent here just waiting to be unearthed but they are going to remain buried if sponsors don’t change their approach to how they spend money earmarked for sponsorship.

In simple terms, we can choose to go on renting when it would be so much better to own.