Baylor Sport Management Graduate Students Capture National Case Study Competition Title

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CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - A team of four graduate students from the Baylor University Graduate Sport Management Program brought home the championship in the third annual Case Study Competition held during the Scholarly Conference on College Sport April 20-22 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The conference was sponsored by UNC's College Sport Research Institute (CSRI).

Baylor team members Leeann Lower, Meron Tamrat, BBA '10, Kyle Lintelman and Lane Wakefield were honored for their accomplishment by Dr. Richard Southall, director of the CSRI, who spoke during the conference's opening session. An additional Baylor team composed of Christopher Buford, BSED '10, Lindsey Short, Matt Rodgers and Ryan Kota placed fifth in the graduate division case competition.

"This case study competition afforded our Baylor students an outstanding learning experience in a high-pressure and competitive environment that showcased their problem-solving and presentation skills," said Dr. Jeffrey C. Petersen, assistant professor of health, human performance and recreation and sport management graduate program director at Baylor's School of Education.

"As only the second entry by members the Baylor sport management program into this type of competition, the results demonstrated the abilities of these students to compete with and even surpass the leading programs in the country," added Petersen, an active researcher who also serves as the team's faculty sponsor.

Case Study

The initial portion of the case focused on the long-term ramifications for intercollegiate athletics at institutions, such as Elon University and the University of North Carolina-Greenville, that have pursued membership in Division I. Addressing the construct of upward drift and the tangential benefits associated with athletic success, the competing students drafted a position statement regarding the value of intercollegiate athletics in achieving institutional goals.

The opening round included a 10-day period to develop a 1,000-word written response to the case that was reviewed by a panel of three judges. The second portion involved a 15-minute presentation before a panel of experts that analyzed whether or not the University of Nebraska-Omaha should have moved to Division I.

The Baylor team outdistanced the two-time defending champion team from Ball State University, which placed third. A team from Georgia State University placed second.

"After coming in second last year, it was very rewarding to beat last year's champion school," said Lower, team captain and a master's candidate in HHPR/sport management from Mason, Ohio. "The case study competition was a great opportunity to learn about theoretical foundations that help explain movements in the field of college sport. The CSRI conference is a valuable venue for research presentation and discussion."

"The case competition was a great opportunity to apply the skills we have learned in the classroom to a real-life situation that actual sport administrators deal with," said Tamrat, a master's candidate in HHPR/sport management from Pearland.

"I personally enjoyed working with our group to think through current issues within the realm of sport management and also appreciated the chance to hone our presentation skills," said Wakefield, a master's candidate in HHPR/sport management from Waco.

"The ability to look at a real case in our discipline and apply it to different aspects of our field really gave us a chance to expand our knowledge, and winning made it fun too, of course," said Lintelman, a master's candidate in HHPR/sport management from Garland.

Research presentations

In addition to the two teams' work in preparing and presenting in the case competition, Baylor graduate students presented nine peer-reviewed research presentations during the conference:

• Wakefield, Buford and Tamrat shared results from data collected last fall in a poster on "A Comparison of Student-Athlete versus Student Attendance of FBS Football."
  
• Lintelman, Kota, Rodgers and Short presented a poster on "A Comparison of Football Ticket Sales and Marketing Strategies within Private FBS Institutions" that was created from a data set collected during the fall 2010 Sport Management course.
  
• Patrick Haines presented a poster session on "An Analysis of the Impact of One-and-Done on the Academic and Professional Success of Division I Basketball Players."
  
• Lower presented "A Comparison of Goal Orientation and Perceived Benefits between Collegiate Varsity and Club Sport" in a 30-minute oral presentation based on an extension of her thesis research.

The Baylor program also was well represented through research presented by Petersen, including his paper on "Creatine Usage and Education of Track and Field Throwers at NCAA Division I Universities" and a poster presentation on "Prevention-Based Deterrence of Performance-Enhancing Drugs: Are USATF Coaches on Track?"

The Scholarly Conference on College Sport is an annual event for faculty, athletic administrators, students, sport practitioners and the public interested in research, theory and critical thinking about college sport and surrounding issues. The conference was hosted by the College Sport Research Institute (CSRI) housed at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The mission of the CSRI is to encourage and support interdisciplinary and interuniversity collaborative college-sport research, serve as a research consortium for college-sport researchers from across the United States, and disseminate college-sport research results to academicians, college-sport practitioners and the general public.

For more information, contact Dr. Jeffrey Petersen at jeffrey_petersen@baylor.edu or 254-710-4007.

Media contact: Lori Fogleman, director of media communications, (254) 710-6275