Monday Musings on Sports – Switching Tracks…literarily and figuratively. Part 1

Monday has rolled by again and it’s time for some more random thoughts on how I got into sports up and where I currently am, in what I consider a roller coaster of a profession. Sports is billed as an experience industry, in the same category as entertainment and the creative industries (film, art, music and fashion). In fact, sports is the largest of what is known as the CCIs – Creative and Cultural Industries – but let’s not go there today because the practitioners in the music, art and entertainment sector will summon an emergency meeting of their members to gather on my page and debate the merits or demerits of this statement. Before you know it, today’s musings will become a debate, lasting for hours!

Today’s thoughts follow the trajectory from last week but on another tangent – switching tracks from what you studied or from where you started your professional career. As I mentioned last week, if you don’t buy a ticket, you can only dream of winning the lottery. Building on that, you have to give something a try to even determine if you will be good at it. In the same vein, if you find yourself stagnating in your chosen field of work, instead focusing on a talent or skill you have that keeps you occupied more than your regular job, devoting a lot of time and resources on acquiring knowledge in that skill or talent and generally becoming a subject matter expert of sorts, then it might be time to take a long, hard look at where you are and whether its time to make a switch to doing what you love.?

My switch to considering sports as profession and charting a career path beyond being an athlete (howbeit more of an amateur one seeing as I was working in marketing) took me quite a while to get into, because, you see, my first degree is in Chemistry (sounds strange saying it and my daughter teases me quite a bit about it, especially when a science issue comes up and I hesitate in providing answers!). Though I was a science student, I was involved in a lot of extra-curricular activities that had more to do with the arts and creative industries than science – modelling, fashion, arts, sports – and continued with those areas after graduating. I worked in a Trade Fair Consulting firm for my Youth Service and stayed in that line post service. Tried to work in the brewing industry, but that fell through in a way I still consider as my first encounter with gender stereotyping (matter for another day – I have a lot of those!).

Looking at the landscape then and considering how I seemed to have embraced the marketing field, I decided to get a Masters in Business Administration (with a focus on Finance & Marketing) after which I ended up staying in the specialised trade shows, expos and fairs sector, honing my marketing skills by selling intangible products and services. I was still playing squash on a semi-pro level, taking part in competitions and just keeping my feet in that sector and exploring options for a career in sports by serving as a board member of the national federation as well as state association, and being a Tournament Director for two years. Even when I branched out into setting up a corporate gifts marketing and distribution company, I still stayed in sports. You could say my body was in marketing my business but my heart was in sports, and I kept looking out for how this could be a career beyond being an elite athlete (I didn’t have the top skills to get to that top, plus clearly the only career path there was as a coach or administrator in the state sports association or sports ministry – a public sector employee).?

A chance conversation with a friend around Nigeria’s first outing at the FIFA World Cup (USA’94) was what finally tipped me over the fence to land fully on the sports side. I had shared my total dissatisfaction with what I was doing and the fact that I just could not see myself 10-20 years down the line carting samples of corporate gifts from office to office, trying to persuade decision makers that my gifts were the best for them, in a space where who you knew mattered more than the quality of items you were presenting. In my friend’s words, “Why don’t you focus on sports, where you have so much knowledge, and where you would pay to be allowed to be involved? You already do so much in that space, you have been in administration, you have played to a reasonably high degree, you are beginning to understand the ecosystem and more importantly, you are more or less the go-to person when we have arguments among friends on sports statistics and data. Find a way to get paid for doing something you are already doing for free”!

That was it!....The trigger that set me off on sports as a career, more importantly, sports management, and how we could make sports work, how to earn revenue from the ancillary sectors of the sports value chain and how to grow personally and professionally within the sector. Most importantly, how I could earn a living doing what I loved. I started off generally consulting for companies who wanted to use sports as a marketing and communication tool, and was it tough! Convincing decision makers that I knew about sports was hard – most of the people I faced whenever I had to pitch propositions were male and the first question was usually, “What do you know about football? How can a woman know about football?” The presentation would then degenerate into a quiz session on the whole gamut of football or sports, in a bid to test my knowledge of sports and catch me out.

It was frustrating, especially if I attended the presentation with my male colleagues who were presenters and not the marketing expert (which I was). The questions on the presentation would be directed at my male colleagues despite the fact that I had made the presentation. I knew I had to do something drastic to convince the greatest number of people within the shortest period of time, that I was a subject matter expert and there was really no need to spend valuable time trying to trip me up about what I might or might not know about sports in general, and football in particular!

This was what took me into appearing on TV and radio as an analyst on football matches and sports programmes such as UEFA Champions League, World Cup, Olympic Games, and other football matches and sports programmes across a variety of television and radio stations. For eight years, I was a regular feature on the other side of the table from the presenter, and had the opportunity to tell the over 60 million plus viewers (NTA viewership statistics then) what I knew about sports. The day I knew I had succeeded was the day I stopped to buy roasted plantain in Abuja and the woman selling it to me exclaimed, “Madam nor be you dey talk football for NTA?’ Boom! I had achieved that face recognition in Nigeria that was necessary to reinforce my knowledge of sports…and it took a “mere EIGHT years”!

The next step was to move to the other side of the table, as a presenter, so I could then explore opportunities in the content development space and set the tone for programmes and interviews, instead of being the respondent all the time. You see, at that time (in the mid-nineties) the money in sports was in media, content development and broadcast. Not much has changed – sports media, content development and distribution still rule the world of sports today. Companies paid a lot of money to place their adverts on sports programmes and events broadcast (Radio and TV), and a lot of presenters were making money designing and presenting programmes. Presenters were paid double what analysts received, and a good presenter was a treasured part of any broadcast station’s personnel.

Clearly, the upward trajectory for a career in sports media went by way of being a presenter, and sports media was the place to be. Presentation was therefore my target, but how to switch was not as clear to me, seeing as it was considered male territory. There was only one female presenter and she was a full-fledged staff of the station and had just started her career as a presenter. Unfortunately, I was not a staff of the TV station, I was a guest analyst. ?

Next Monday, in Part 2, I’ll talk about how the switch to presentation happened fortuitously, how I became known among my circle of friends as “Okay, let’s go”, and how presenting and producing sports programmes on TV and Radio took me down another path into change management and what I do now. ???Until then, have a great week at work….or play.