|News & Know How| News
SportsArt Helps High School to RISE UP
Social Media
Lights, Camera … YouTube! By Patricia Amend
H SportsArt goes to school
>Earlier this year, the Ingraham High School, in Seattle, Washington, was the beneficiary of RISE UP, an inspirational TV series produced by ESPN, and SportsArt Fitness, the Woodinville, Washington- based equipment manufacturer and IHRSA associate member. RISE UP represents an effort on ESPN’s
part to call attention to the substandard condition of many high schools’ athletic facilities and, then, correct them. “Currently, many schools across
America are suffering from budget cuts that severely limit their ability to offer sports and physical education to their students,” explains Joan Lynch, the show’s executive producer. “RISE UP was created to shine a spotlight on public high schools that realize the long-term benefits of students who play sports, and are maximizing their limited resources and facilities to keep their students engaged in, and inspired by, athletics.” ESPN identified four target schools
and turned to donors and community resources to renovate their athletic facilities. Ingraham’s hadn’t been upgraded for more than 50 years. “When you look around here, you walk into a time warp in 1959, when the school was built—same lockers, same everything,” observes Prin- cipal Martin Floe. “This is an opportunity to meet the needs of today’s athlete.” Today, though, thanks to SportsArt
and Bayley Construction, a local builder, Ingraham has a modern, impressively equipped sports and fitness venue.—|
28 Club Business Internat ional
ave you been using YouTube to gain more fans and “followers” for your club? If not, you may be missing out on a tremendous opportunity to display
your facility, your staff, your services, your members’ success stories, and your message to millions of viewers—at virtually no cost. YouTube, a video-sharing Website and subsidiary of Google, displays amateur
content and allows unregistered users to watch unlimited videos as often as they’d like. Registered users may upload short videos they’ve produced themselves to the YouTube site. There is no cost to register and no restriction on video length. Club professionals Bob Roche and Martin Rooney have found YouTube to be
a low-cost, exceptionally effective method of driving interest to their brands. Roche, the president of Gold’s
Gym in Middletown, New York, has been using YouTube since 2007. To date, his YouTube clips have received 500,000 “hits” or visits. “We record a wide range of the
classes we offer, plus personal training and group training ses- sions and member testimonials. We edit the footage down to two to three minutes and include a call to action—something I think most clubs fail to do. We’ll include a link to our Website, or give our number and encourage viewers to call us to obtain a free seven-day pass. We also add iden- tification tags so that people can find us when they do a Google search.” One of Roche’s recent videos was particularly inspiring—Exercising at Gold’s Gym Helped Pat Get in Shape so He Could Donate a Kidney to His Wife:
youtube.com/ watch?v=Qg5TvDVOnQc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL. And the cost? A $79 video camera, which includes editing software, Roche points out, though
other movie-editing software is available for both Macs and PCs. Rooney, the COO of the 75-unit Parisi Speed School franchise, has been employing YouTube to promote both the Parisi School and his Training For Warriors (TFW) program for the last three years. “I have uploaded hundreds of short clips, which have had 1.7 million views combined. That’s created a lot of visibility, viewership, and interest for both brands. We also have our own channel on YouTube to which viewers can subscribe. That means, whenever I post a new clip, our 6,000 subscribers are notified.” There’s a learning curve to shooting a good clip, he concedes, but he has seen
his own skill improve over time. “Now I can be pretty creative,” he says. Rooney has also learned to maximize his reach by “cross-pollinating” his
YouTube offerings with other social media sites. “Whenever I post a new YouTube clip, I post a link to it on Facebook and
Twitter so our Facebook friends and Twitter followers will see it, too. This is the great thing about social media. It’s free and accessible, and it’s where people are spending their time. I would urge all clubs to use it to the fullest extent they can.” —|
| DECEMBER 2011 |
ihrsa.org
ESPN
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