Lone Star brings branding benefits home
Signage at basketball tournaments showcases conference and Division II
By Gary Brown
The NCAA News
Part of what has made Division II's identity campaign so successful the past several years is the buy-in from conferences and institutions to promote themselves under the Division II and NCAA umbrella.
The Lone Star Conference provided an example of how applying Division II's branding templates locally can pay dividends with its recent men's and women's basketball tournaments in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
The conference not only marketed the event to promote member schools, the league and the division, but it used real-life applications of the six attributes in the division's strategic-positioning platform (learning, balance, resourcefulness, sportsmanship, passion and service) to tell the student-athlete story to league members, fans and the Bartlesville community.
In an innovative approach, the league placed attribute banners from the Division II purchasing Web site in prominent locations around Bartlesville's Bruin Fieldhouse and then linked those visuals with real examples of how the conference activates the attributes.
For example, while fans at last year's Lone Star championships were provided pompoms in the colors of their favorite teams to help with the atmosphere surrounding the games, this year they realized why. "After sitting down and thinking about it, we realized that's passion," said Lone Star Commissioner Stan Wagnon. "So this year we made them available under the ‘passion' banner and had some signage there that tied the two together. Division II institutions believe in passion - and we explained why passion is one of the attributes. We said, ‘Here, take a pompom and show your passion by cheering for your favorite team.' "
That's a simple application, to be sure, but Lone Star officials had all six bases covered.
- For learning, the conference placed fliers under the "learning" banner at each of the tournaments' eight sessions that gave fans an opportunity to learn something new about Lone Star schools. One explained what the Texas A&M-Kingsville nickname - the Javelinas - meant. (If you don't know, find out here.) Another reviewed the new men's three-point line in use this season for Bartlesville fans who may not have known about it since there isn't an NCAA school in town.
- For service, posters explained ways in which the Lone Star and its members serve their communities. One told how Lone Star schools' Student-Athlete Advisory Committees have declared every April to be "Community-Service Month" and displayed pictures and stories about various outreach efforts. Another detailed how the conference SAAC helped build access ramps last summer for seniors through the Texas Ramp Project.
- For balance, the conference focused on its academic awards program, with snapshots of recent winners. Another poster focused on a career-development program offered to student-athletes that prepares them for life after athletics.
- For sportsmanship, posters on the game environment pledge did the trick, as well as a PSA that asked fans to cheer the right way.
- For resourcefulness, the conference offered coupons for each session - from $2 off on a T-shirt to $3 off for the championship game - to send the message that the conference believes in resourcefulness as a Division II attribute and wants to provide the same kind of resourcefulness to its fans.
"If you think about it, those six attributes are things most Division II members already do, but people don't stop to connect the dots. We wanted to call attention to the six attributes by turning them into something tangible for the fans - and maybe even ourselves - to understand better," Wagnon said.
But why go to such trouble? Well, Wagnon said the benefits are as tangible as the promotions themselves. Fans walked away with a better understanding of the Division II athletics model and how the Lone Star is a good steward of the standards.
"The Division II strategic-positioning platform - and specifically those six attributes - has made it easier for us to tell our story," Wagnon said. "Most everyone in Division II has a positive story to tell - our conference has been around since 1931 and we have a lot of tradition. Having a template to fit things into has helped us organize and tell our story better than we have in previous years."
But there's more good news. The format of the Lone Star men's and women's basketball championships provides a day off between the first and second rounds for each gender, and teams use that off-day to interact with the Bartlesville community. For example, the eight women's teams in the tournament play their first-round games on Wednesday, and then all eight teams - even those that lost - stay the night and participate in a community-engagement event the next morning. The men's teams do the same thing Thursday-Friday.
This year, the women's teams staged a bowling party for kids with special needs, and the men's team visited elementary schools to talk about being role models and provide positive sportsmanship examples.
"We don't want this to be a one-way deal where our teams show up, play basketball and leave without the community getting anything out of it - we wanted this to be a two-way partnership with the community. That's one of the reasons we chose our game format," Wagnon said.
He noted that last year, teams that lost in the first round tended to return quickly to their campus, but this year, all teams were encouraged to stay for the community engagement regardless of their on-court result.
"To me," Wagnon said, "those events were more successful this year, and the student-athletes and the communities are recognizing that we mean business with our attributes. They witness the behavior first-hand."
While it took some effort to develop the strategy, Wagnon said using the Division II template to position the conference and its members has paid off with a better understanding of what Division II - and the Lone Star Conference - are all about.
"Among the reasons we wanted to stage the tournaments at a neutral site was not only to provide for a more competitively balanced athletics experience but also to showcase ourselves as a conference," he said. "Obviously, we are a proud member of Division II, and the six attributes are what we take pride in as well. All of those things we feel like we've been doing already - but to categorize all of that under the six attributes makes for a better presentation and seems to have helped both our members and fans see the value we have as a Division II conference."
