Mr. Stricklin oversees a myriad of tasks. He helps facilitate and run Sports Marketing as well as coaching football and basketball. But on top of that, this year he will take on the new merger between Panther Pack and Sports Marketing as the faculty advisor.
After members of sports marketing and Assistant Principal for Student Life Mr. Liu brought up the idea of combining both classes last year, Stricklin “thought that it would be a great idea to combine sports marketing and Panther Pack, which helps market all the sports.”
Sophomores Taylor Lee and Grace Bailey are part of the Sports Marketing class. Lee enters her second year as part of Sports Marketing while Bailey enters her very first year. Lee believes that “the merge is much needed because the student body last year, wasn’t really involved in a lot of what sports marketing did. I feel it would be good to get their thoughts and opinions of what we like and put them to life.”
Despite the new changes this year, the two already have high hopes to look forward to this school year. Bailey shared that she hopes the club “can get more involvement in the in the student body, but also have more people all hands-on deck to make our games the most hype and we can use the help from Panther Pack to get people to do that.”
Like Bailey, Lee shared the same aspirations as she wants “to get more of the student body involved because [she] feels like sports marketing was just [their] ideas and what [they] took from what [they] thought was cool. Now [they] get to take the student body’s ideas and make it come true with new themes.”
With success and participation on their mind, the future of Sports Marketing looks bright.
Taking the best aspects of both is vital. While Sports Marketing can help make media, Panther Pack can help more people attend sporting events. Already this year, Stricklin as the advisor said that the club “took a big step in making more content, but also aiming on making it more consistent and finding different ways to get people to games and finding fun ways to figure out what allows more kids to be at those games.”
Right now, the club is focusing on making graphics for all of the fall sports. Those will be posted to social media, where Stricklin said that the goal is to “get more stuff posted to all our kids on social media so they can be more aware of what’s going on with our school and making sure they are engaged in all the activities that we have to offer, at least athletics wise.”
That’s not all, however, and Stricklin believes they could accomplish so much more. “We’re going to try to find a different way to create more content. I think just different ways besides just doing video. So, one’s going be graphics and then just helping with cheers, which we have a video of as well too. You know, it’s just a plethora of things.”
Over the coming months, there will be dozens of themes in several different sports, each one unique. The club hopes people will buy in to the spirit and take in the experience while in high school. On behalf of the entire sports marketing team, Stricklin said that “We encourage people to participate and do the themes because when there’s max participation, it’s always a lot more fun.”
