Fresh off of co-hosting the inaugural Sports PR Summit in San Francisco at the offices of Twitter, Lauren Teague discusses the landscape of social media and digital experts in sports. Teague talks about some of the challenges facing digital professionals as live streaming becomes more evident, as well as how the social media role at teams and leagues has transitioned from communications to marketing. Teague broadens the perspective of the NFL's live streaming Thursday Night Football on Twitter with how she chose to consume the event's broadcast, and her time at the PGA Tour, overseeing digital when Tiger Woods ran the table of every course in 2009, and how the organization has fared since his dominance has ended. Twitter: @LaurenTee
Michael Brooks has helped launch one of the more significant eSports associations at the varsity collegiate level across the United States. The National Association of Collegiate eSports has grown quickly out of the NAIA's Kansas City office, as Brooks tells it, with over 20 charter university members offering scholarships, 70 percent of the eSports programs being under campus athletic departments. Brooks describes the eSports landscape at the varsity collegiate, which students it attracts and how the programming is attempting to foster growth of female participants. Twitter: @NACeSports
NCAA Hockey may be a regional sport, but Holy Cross markets it as one of its primaries. Senior Associate Athletic Director of External Operations Joe Bertoletti is responsible for the sales and marketing of the athletic department, and discusses some of the nuances of selling a sport in a hockey-mad area, where there are few comparable programs to judge everything from pricing to marketing against. Bertoletti discusses raising up the profile of women's sports such as lacrosse and hockey at Holy Cross, despite the lack of the school's history in female sports. Twitter: @Jberto13