In traditional sports analogies, “changing the game” would mean a new play that surprises the competition, a new piece of equipment that improves performance, new field turf that prevents injuries or makes the athletes faster and more agile.  An athlete might be a “game changer” because of their size, speed, strength, skill or leadership.

We are talking about changing a high school sports culture that is 100 years old, clogged by an academic/government/union controlled environment, with politically charged positions on every side of the simplest issue.  The Sportzine strategy and business model has been developed over 14 years, hundreds of thousands of dollars and with the contributions of dozens of smart people.  Here is a short primer on the hard lessons learned.

The challenges are many.  We tried to work with the schools and found that they have a rule, regulation, policy or procedure that prevents anything good from ever happening.  We found that meetings and approvals took so long that our affiliates starved waiting for permission.  We found that in a school with 10 champions of our model, one person could stop us in our tracks because in politically charged schools, any potential for a person who hasn’t been born yet to be impacted in a way we can’t anticipate at this time is adequate reason to not do anything new.  So, it is clear that we can't play by their rules.

We tried to work directly with booster clubs and discovered that they subordinate their power to the AD or the school district/AD proactively intrudes in the booster club's operations.  Either way, working with booster clubs was just as inefficient and laiden with road blocks as working with the schools.

Intuition tells us that the AD will be our friend and open doors for us.  After all, we offer free money!  He or she might even be your sibling or spouse and really want you to succeed.  However, when you subordinate control of your business to anyone inside a school’s sphere of influence, you are done.  It’s a shame because we could do so much more together.

This brings us back to our tagline: Changing the Game.

The bottom line is that schools are not winning the game under their current strategies and financial limitations.  They are confined by the institutions, culture and history that defines them.  The game they are playing has too many inhibiting rules, too few volunteers and too few resources to do big things or to even change strategies in a timely manner.

But Sportzine Publishers are not confined by these fences.  Stay off their playing field, change how score is kept, rewrite the rules, expand the roster to include local businesses, and, play the game like champions.  The defined Sportzine business model can be enhanced with additional fundraising features to potentially double the impact of the current features.  Sportzine Publishers cannot "save high school sports" alone but they can lead the way.  Winning is the only option.

The general message in Changing the Game is to empower a joint force of businesses and booster clubs to do things they could never do on their own.  This creates an aggregate market and opportunity for business boosters large enoght hat they are able to offer long term, professional, high value fundraising marketing campaigns that result in meaningful income for everyone.