Back on the Field

The following article appeared in the March 2016 issue of Athletic Management.  It highlights Marion High School's Giant Challenge Alumni Weekend.

Caitlin Hayes is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management. She can be reached at: ch@MomentumMedia.com.

In early September, Arizona Cardinals defensive back Patrick Peterson donated $1 million to his alma mater, Louisiana State University, to help fund a renovation to the Football Operations Center. It was one of the largest single contributions to athletics by a former LSU football player, and Peterson was recognized on the field at the Tigers’ 2015 home opener.

The donation was noteworthy not just because it was large but because it was from the ranks of professional athletes, a group that traditionally has not opened their wallets for their alma maters. What happened next was also significant. A few days later, pledge cards came in from two more former Tigers currently in the NFL, Bennie Logan and Tyrann Mathieu.

“I think there’s a bit of a culture shift happening,” says Kristen Cain, LSU’s Special Events and Community Relations Coordinator, who runs the L Club, a group specifically for alumni athletes. “More players are giving back to their universities—and they are offering large donations.

“Behind the scenes, we’re doing a better job of reaching out to our former athletes,” she adds. “We’re educating them about our athletic foundation and what we do with donated money.”

While Peterson’s gift generated headlines, the trend is not exclusive to large athletic departments. “Alumni and fundraising go together, and if you’re not tapping into or at least trying to cultivate your former athletes, you’re probably not doing your job as effectively as you could,” says Tim Schoonveld, Co-Athletic Director at NCAA Division III Hope College. “Like a lot of schools, we’re trying to find news ways to draw in alumni athletes. We’re not looking to create a booster club. But we’re looking to really engage our alumni in what we’re doing.”

Jamy Bechler, Athletic Director at Marion (Ind.) High School, echoes Schoonveld’s thoughts and adds that you can’t look at it as a one-way street. “Reaching out to alumni athletes is essential from a fundraising standpoint,” he says. “But you’ve got to know and appreciate your past. No former athlete wants to be forgotten. Those alumni made your teams great. We’re working hard to honor them and connect with them.”

So what are the best ways to engage alumni athletes? Are they looking for something different than other former students? And how can athletic departments create an active community comprised of former athletes? We talked to athletic administrators who are putting new ideas in place.

SPORT-SPECIFIC

As the demographic shifts in the younger alumni population, luncheons and receptions are losing ground as the most desirable events. More and more schools are relying on affinity groups to reconnect with former students, and efforts with alumni athletes are following suit. Many schools are learning that building events around athletic contests yields the most participation from former players—and that alumni athletes tend to care most about the program they played for.

“We’ve found that the best way to work with alumni athletes is to keep them connected to their team,” says Scott Allen, Associate Director of Athletic Alumni Programs at George Washington University. “So we give them opportunities to interact with the current coaching staff and student-athletes, which makes them feel like they’re a part of an athletic community.”

Allen helps coaching staffs find the optimal time and location to host their former athletes. 

“Sometimes it’s just looking at schedules and figuring out where the most alumni are concentrated,” he says. “Our lacrosse team likes to do something in Philadelphia, for instance. Our water polo team has events in California, where a lot of their alumni live. The rowing team welcomes its alumni at two big regattas every year. So it’s crucial to find the right time and the right places for each program.”

At its events, GWU tends to host receptions before and after the competitions to give former players time to interact with each other, the coaches, and the current student-athletes. “The alumni get to reminisce with former teammates and see how they’re doing,” says Allen. “They also get to feel connected to what’s going on in the program now.”

Hope College has had success with team-based alumni events that celebrate anniversaries of championships or that serve as reunions for players from a certain era. Having a more specific focus for these events gets people involved who otherwise wouldn’t attend. Honorees are typically recognized before or during a contest and are later welcomed at receptions where they can mingle and reconnect with former teammates.

“We’re inviting all the men’s basketball players from the 1980s back to one of the team’s games this year,” says Schoonveld. “Then we’re honoring our 2005 women’s basketball team, which won the NCAA Division III national championship. Those are the kinds of things we do on top of the more regularly-scheduled events.”

At the high school level, Marion upped its efforts to connect with alumni athletes last summer through its inaugural Giant Challenge. The event brought more than 500 alumni and current athletes together to compete. (See “Then vs. Now," below).

“Having an alumni game isn’t new, but it is kind of unique to have one weekend when all your alumni athletes come back and play different sports,” says Bechler. “We had 10 teams represented, with 10 different competitions. Alumni had a chance to see each other and to spend time with the athletes who are playing now. It was a very good weekend.”

A PERSONAL TOUCH

One of the reasons the Giant Challenge was such a success is that Bechler and his staff asked for—and received—help from many others. “It was a team effort that included administrators throughout the school, coaches, our alumni, and our current athletes,” he says. “Any athletic director trying to take this on has to recruit a good group of people to pitch in.”

That teamwork is especially needed when creating a network of alumni athletes. While social media makes it easier than ever to reach people, a generic Facebook post or Tweet is often not enough to get someone involved in a meaningful way.

“For each of our alumni teams, we had a former player serve as captain and that person reached out to others,” Bechler says. “That was great because, even though we put the event out on social media and contacted a lot of people, a personal touch from an alum was invaluable.”

LSU uses its L Club, a group exclusively for lettermen alumni, as well as alumni athletic trainers, cheerleaders, and equipment managers, to develop connections. An alumni athlete representative from every sport serves on the L Club Board of Directors. This point person can work with individual sport coaches and reach out to alumni from their programs. “The L Club has been around for many years, but until recently, it was looked at as more of a football thing, and there was a period when it wasn’t very active,” says Cain. “Since 2009, we’ve put more resources and more effort into it through my position and our board, and we’ve increased our membership from 45 in 2009 to over 1,000 in 2015.”

GWU hopes to delegate more responsibility to alumni volunteers in the near future. “We’d like to get to a point where we have a real structure of sport boards, where every sport has an alumni committee that is responsible for doing some of the things that I’m doing now,” Allen says. “If you can find key volunteers in each decade or era to help you reach out to others, that can overcome the communication challenges.”

At the high school level especially, the community at large can help with drawing in alumni. Last year, Frederick (Md.) High School brought back more than 30 distinguished former athletes from all sports to honor their accomplishments. Following a reception, each alum was invited onto the court at a boys’ basketball game as their individual achievements were announced. Organizers of the event found many of the former athletes via current community members.

“We connected with some of our alumni through family they still had in the area, and we found additional ones who had relatives now attending the school,” says Athletic Director Keivette Hammond. “Using that personal network to reach out to them can be more effective than social media.”

Allen keeps in mind that many older alumni athletes don’t use social media and utilizes both print and online newsletters and invitations. Once alumni are on board, he’s found that consistency is key. “If there is regular communication, it becomes an expectation and a part of the conversation,” Allen says. “When someone changes an email address and then realizes they didn’t get this fall’s eblast, they contact us to update their information. Once a routine is established, they won’t want to miss out.”

STARTING NOW

Since staying in touch with former athletes is a big part of the equation, more and more schools are trying to get a jump-start on the process by cultivating connections with their current athletes. With a captive audience, athletic departments can educate student-athletes about ways to be involved alumni before they even graduate.

At LSU, Cain makes sure current student-athletes know who she is and are familiar with the L Club. “I try to get around to each team at least two or three times a year,” she says. “And every August at the back-to-school bash, our alumni board members and I do the letter jacket presentations, so they know that those jackets are coming from the L Club.”

Membership in the L club requires annual dues and comes with benefits—such as gameday hospitality at football games, free tickets to select sporting events, access to a database of alumni for networking, and invitations to reunions and special events—but membership is free to student-athletes the first two years after they graduate. “The idea is that we can then automatically renew them after the introductory period ends,” says Cain. “But the challenge is keeping them on board that third year when there are fees. The more they know about the club, the more likely they’ll be to remain members.”

Cain says it’s also important to get students’ most current contact information before they leave school. “It’s hardest to keep track of them just after they graduate,” she says. “When they have their exit meetings, that’s when we gather their current contact information.”

At Marion, Bechler tries to give current athletes a sense of their place in the history and tradition of the school, which he hopes will stay with them. “For instance, for our boys’ basketball team, we put together a pre-game video with clips from past teams, and we have narration from some of our best alumni players talking about our tradition,” he says. “When the current athletes see that, they start to appreciate the guys who came before them. They start to understand what the name on the front of their jersey actually means. We’re not necessarily getting them hooked up with the alumni association right out of the gate, but we are trying to help them understand their team’s past.”

THE PAY-OFF

A major benefit of having an engaged alumni athlete population is that it makes it easier to cultivate donors. But another important result is that it sets up cross-generational relationships. In many ways, the two go hand-in-hand.

“I think that fundraising is as much about relationship-building as anything,” Schoonveld says. “The best strategy is to invite people to campus and make sure they have a great experience together. We want them to see the new buildings, learn what we’re all about, and understand what a difference this place is making in the lives of current student-athletes.”

Allen tries to link the fundraising angle directly to the former player’s experience. “At GW, there are teams that have had some great stretches and other time periods when they weren’t so strong,” he says. “Understanding that back story changes what I might say to a specific alumni athlete. If they were on a team that didn’t win a lot of games or didn’t have the resources that they needed, I can ask them to make current athletes’ experiences better. If they won championships, I might ask them to think of the success they had, and emphasize that we want to make sure we maintain it and keep up with our rivals and schools with bigger budgets.”

Often donors want to see how their money improves the experiences of current athletes. “When we have a specific need they can fill, it’s a lot easier to convince people to give,” says Allen. “If a tennis alum can see the new rackets the team bought or hear how excited the athletes were to fly somewhere for a match, they’re able to know that their money is actually doing something tangible.”

For current athletes, having connections with those who came before them provides the long view, both in terms of where they are and where they’re going. “Engaging alumni makes sense because that’s who you are as a school. They are your identity and your history,” says Bechler. “The Giant Challenge was more than a reunion—it was a gesture of support for our current teams, and it was a chance for alumni to give our current players perspective. They were saying things like, ‘If only we could have played on this turf field,’ and ‘You guys are lucky. You should feel fortunate and privileged.’ And the students were listening.”

At LSU, the L Club works with life skills programming to develop ways that alumni athletes can advise current athletes with their post-graduation plans. “We just had an event called ‘The Vision,’ where we brought back L Club members from different professional fields,” says Cain. “They met and spoke with the student-athletes in groups and one-on-one sessions about networking, resumes, careers, and even how to brand yourself. The student-athletes can relate to somebody who’s been in their shoes, and they see that there’s a life after athletics. And I think the alumni really enjoy being asked to come back.”

Sometimes an event can even help a school heal. One of the motivations for inviting alumni back to Frederick High School was a desire to unite the community after a shooting outside the gym during a junior varsity basketball game. “We wanted to emphasize and remind ourselves of the rich tradition of athletics throughout the time that we’ve been a school,” says Hammond. “We wanted the younger athletes to look back on what it was like when those alumni played here. Some things have changed, but we share the same tradition.”

At Hope, alumni are even investing time in potential future athletes. “We’re having more and more coaches and teams that are asking former players to help recruit,” says Schoonveld. “Our football program will bring back 40 or 50 alumni on a Saturday, partner each with a recruit, and have them share their experiences.

“These relationships between the athletic department and our alumni athletes are about a lot more than money,” Schoonveld continues. “They’re about a love for the school.”

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One Chef

With multiple events and stakeholders, keeping alumni athletes involved is a big job with a lot of moving parts. Alumni relations and development departments, alumni associations, foundations, booster clubs, coaches, and athletic directors have to work together, and with that many cooks in the kitchen, it can make a mess.

At the college level, some schools are solving the problem by appointing a specific individual to head up their alumni athlete efforts. LSU created the full-time position of Special Events and Community Relations Coordinator in 2009, now held by Kristen Cain, who is responsible for connecting the school’s letterman club with the athletic department. She also serves as liaison to the Tiger Athletic Foundation and individual sport coaches to plan events.

“Having someone in the department who can oversee everything is invaluable,” says Cain. “Because of where I am, I can get our L Club members what they need, and I also have access to the coaches and current student-athletes.”

In 2011, George Washington University hired Scott Allen to serve as Associate Director of Athletic Alumni Programs, a dual role that straddles alumni relations and the athletic department. He works on alumni events for athletes and brings the general alumni population to sporting events.

“Most athletic departments probably don’t have a person dedicated to these things, and I think our setup really helps,” says Allen. “I work three days a week in the athletic department and two days a week in alumni relations. So I am physically in both buildings. It gives me the opportunity to keep both sides informed. There are things happening in athletics that alumni relations wouldn’t be aware of and vice versa.”

At Hope College, a similar position has just been approved. “That’s been the one thing that’s held us back—we’ve had an alumni office, and a public affairs and marketing area, and then athletics, but there’s never been somebody designated to own it,” says Co-Athletic Director Tim Schoonveld. “In our athletic department, most of us already have dual roles. I’m half-time athletic director and half-time professor, as are almost all of our coaches, so to add one more thing onto our list is difficult. The new position is really an investment in alumni athletes by the college.”

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Then vs. Now

Bringing back alumni athletes for a weekend event is always an ambitious undertaking. Marion (Ind.) High School made it happen and then some with a two-day event called the Giant Challenge, where more than 500 current and alumni athletes gathered to compete against each other.

Alumni teams, coordinated by alumni captains, played against current squads in soccer, basketball, softball, baseball, volleyball, football, golf, tennis, and track and field. The contests were staggered over a Friday and Saturday in July, with current and former cheerleaders boosting school spirit throughout. There was also a golf tournament, road race, and tennis matches.

Funding came from registration fees—alumni athletes paid $25, which allowed them to participate in any and all activities. Members of the public could sign up for the golf, tennis, and road race events for the same price. Spectators paid $5 a day, and T-shirts were sold, both before and during the weekend. Donations from individuals and businesses in the community helped get the Challenge off the ground and raise funds for the athletic department. Overall, the school brought in $17,000 to put towards their new athletic endowment.

“We did not solicit during the weekend, but we did get a number of people handing us checks,” says Marion Athletic Director Jamy Bechler. “At the end of the day, we raised a decent amount of money. But I am more excited about the buzz the Challenge generated and the connections that were made.”

To promote the event, current students from various teams created videos that were posted on the school’s website, in which they challenged alumni, sometimes even calling out certain former players. Alumni responded with their own videos. “It was competitive but friendly,” says Bechler. “And at the games, great stuff happened between contests and on the sidelines. There was a lot of sharing stories and talking about the good old days. The alumni were bringing up stories like it was yesterday. And they were interacting with our current players. It was more than a reunion—it was, ‘Hey, we’re here for you guys, we support you.’”

Two weeks after the event, organizers were already meeting to talk about next summer’s Challenge. “We’re thinking of ways to make it even better,” says Bechler. “We’ve gathered a lot of input and ideas from the participants, and we’re going to add some things to keep it fresh, such as a bowling competition featuring one of our alums who is a professional bowler and a softball homerun derby. Overall, the weekend was a great thing—people loved coming and getting together.”