Athletics Catching the Fantasy Sports Craze
Credit where credit is due: USATF catches a lot of flack on here for its laissez faire event promotion and uninspired website (multimedia-free since 1993!) but they’ve really got a great thing going on with their Pick ‘N Win game. So much so that the IAAF is now launching one as well.
Americans are so nutty about fantasy sports that sports magazines and sports “news”-programming now drop in tips and references to a past-time that, if you ask me, really has more in common with the stock market than sports, when you think about the way the user interfaces with the activity itself. But you know what? Fantasy sports still manages to engage people more deeply in those sports. Without fantasy sports, do you think I could tell you that Jorge Cantu is having a lights-out May and might be back in the form he showed in 2005 when he hit 28 home runs? No. Without fantasy sports, I bet Freddy Sanchez would still be totally unknown to everybody living in a city not named Pittsburgh. Without fantasy sports, I’d be ignorant of pretty much every ball player never to have laced them up for the Bengals or Reds, save a handful of superstars. Fantasy sports are the new sports trading card, gathering a galaxy of athletes into a format easily contained, perused, and digested.
Considering how sprawling athletics is, with no real “teams,” “leagues” or “seasons,” fantasy track can do so much legwork in nurturing a fan base. I consider myself a pretty die-hard fan of athletics, but realistically, it would be more accurate to call myself a fan of distance running. But last summer, for the first time in my life, I found myself engaged emotionally in events such as the Women’s 400h at the US Outdoors Championships, thanks to my participation in one of LetsRun’s Prediction Contests. The same held true during indoors, as I tracked each of my selections in the USATF Pick ‘N Win contest. Now, during outdoors, I have an even more personal stake, as I’m on the hook for 50% of the cash to fund prizes for the sub-contest held at the website I co-author, Less Than Our Best. Not only has our sub-contest shrunk the field to something where I have a more realistic chance to win (or, I suppose you could say, to not lose), but because this sub-contest is made up of our most regular readers, it has also given rise to some of the rib-poking and trash-talking that makes fantasy baseball and football so popular among friends and family. Instead of just tracking my team through the USATF standings, I had a number of other teams to keep tabs on and try to keep in front of. It’s a new level of investment for even a fully avowed fan like myself.
Fantasy games such as The LetsRun Prediction Contest, USATF Pick ‘N Win, and IAAF Fantasy Athletics have the potential to become the most powerful tools of our sport, encouraging the casual fan to invest in a little research and delve more deeply into the talents on the track, and, hopefully, attracting new fans with the lure of prizes and intra-office bragging rights. But what needs to be done to capitalize on that potential? I believe the lucre needs to be raised sufficiently that people stop picking athletes such as Dee Dee Trotter simply because she is the only name they immediately recognize in a less-than-marquee event, despite two faster entrants hiding beneath just five minutes of research. I believe Internet “water coolers” need to be available for people to congregate around to dish on each others picks. I believe there needs to be the opportunity to associate in smaller sub-contest within those games (a feature the IAAF looks to have integrated in its game).
But above all, it comes back to one thing: these games need to be promoted properly. USATF and the IAAF deserve a thumbs up for featuring these contests prominently on their respective frontpages. But their web traffic has its limits, and their websites are unlikely to reach the non-fan with whom these contests could make the deepest and most significant inroads. So: Advertise in RunnersWorld. Place an ad in high school meet programs.
The movie Boiler Room describes people who “may drive a Porsche but […] don’t have ten bucks to put in the gas tank.” We’ve got something that at least vaguely resembles a Porsche… now fill ‘er up.
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