Today I made it over the 200 contact hour mark that is required for completion of this course. I am ecstatic that I was able to finish my hours with about a little under a month to go prior to starting the actual class. I plan on working past the 200 hour mark if Cliff needs me for anything else -- from the looks of it, I may be actually departing today a lot sooner than I anticipated.
During the day I focused on finishing the budgeting plan for the new and current athletes that train with Clifford Brown Performance. We went through the document and edited any mistakes. We have all of the pictures in the correct spots and have only a few minor details to fix before our presentation.
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I met with Cliff today and we discussed the many influences on the yearly budget. I feel that today was very insightful and I got to see the “behind the scenes” of the athletic and wellness programs. There were several yearly meetings that took place that day discussing the budget and potential changes that would take place. We looked at the needs of the program and discussed ways that funds could be allocated more effectively. One issue we found was that there was an area that was becoming more popular and needed more hours. We drew up a proposal for this change and listed the many ways that this change would benefit the students and faculty. I was not aware of the many steps needed to make a small budgetary change.
Today I was able to make one of my dreams become a reality. I was able to present the information I had learned in my journey in the health and wellness and fitness industry to the many athletes of CBP. Cliff noted that I wanted to work on networking and public speaking during this mentorship, so this was a way for me to accomplish both. Since the beginning of this mentorship, I'd been conducting interviews to present to the clients as a way to present information "I wish I had been told." I consulted managers, owners, marketing directors, nutrition counselors, and anyone else that I thought would be useful for the clients of Clifford Brown Performance to learn from. This presentation went well, and it was well received. It felt good to be able to do this for the athletes, and for myself.
Today, my primary focus was getting in contact with businesses that would be willing to sponsor the Clifford Brown Performance Academy -- more exposure is the goal. After several failures, I was able to get a sponsor for the Academy in the form of another high school. I have been reaching out to almost every business in the city of Cincinnati for sponsorship and have been largely unsuccessful in acquiring sponsors. I am going to start looking outside the city for other options and possible sponsors. This project has turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated in the beginning. Hopefully my luck will turn in the next week or two because I am running out of time to secure sponsorship.
Today I received good news about a donation for the silent auction for the Clifford Brown Performance. At the beginning of my mentorship, I applied for donations from almost every local high school sports team in Ohio. After many rejections, I received an email that the Moeller Crusaders Football team accepted my donation request and I will be receiving the donation in the next week. There are still several places where I applied for donations that I have not received word from yet, but hopefully I will be hearing from them soon.
For the rest of the day, I continued working on the excel spreadsheet containing billing and coding tasks as well as some other small tasks that I needed to complete. Today I sat in on a budget meeting regarding the construction of a new addition to the facility where CBP is stationed. There had been some set backs in the plans in recent meetings, so there were discussions of what was going to be kept in the plans and what was going to be eliminated to save money. The potential implementation of a swimming pool called for the swimming and diving coaches from local high schools to be present in the meeting to provide their opinions on what needed to be included in the pool area in order for them to be able to host swimming and diving events in the event that this actually came to fruition. The meeting also included blue prints and line item pricing for each item that was going to be included in the renovations. The meeting was somewhat of a disappointment for the Clifford Brown Performance Academy because of the cuts that had to be made for the original plans, there was still progress made to complete the project.
Today I got back to work on some of my other projects. I was busy making phone calls to local businesses and visiting other local businesses to find out if they had any interest in sponsoring or being sponsored by CBP. I dropped off some information to these businesses with all the information that is needed to become a sponsor. I still have a long list of businesses that I need to contact and visit. I am hoping that I will start to receive some approved sponsorship for the outing. As I am learning, fundraising is not the easiest thing to do in the world, but it is extremely important for sports facilities, especially those that are just starting out... There is not a lot of money allocated by the owner for athletics and we rely heavily on donations to support the influx of teams -- until further notice that is.
Today I started walking through all of the areas of the facility and making evaluations of each area. We developed a list of potential improvements that could be made to improve each specific area. While we are far from experts on how to make improvements to each area, we were generating a preliminary list of obvious things that need to be upgraded or redone. In the next couple weeks we will be meeting with the coaches that have teams that play in the facility and ask for their opinion on what needs to be improved. I believe that they will have much more insight on the improvements that need to be made considering that they play and practice in the facilities daily. I am looking forward to meeting with all of the coaches to find out if they agree with the list we developed and what other aspects they thing need to be improved.
At the beginning of the day today, I sat in on a meeting with Cliff and the Mount Healthy HS Athletic Director who was voicing a concern regarding a field maintenance issue. The problem she was having was that by rule, they are not allowed to work on the field because it is handled by the maintenance crew. When they have undocumented sessions on the weekend and need the field to be re-lined, they didn't have anyone to fix it and the field technically could be ruled unplayable. They are looking into easy remedies for the issue going forward. After the meeting, I was given a new project to start working on. I will be assisting in the athletic facilities master plan. I am going to develop a formatted paper to analyze the current facilities and make recommendations for upgrades. I am very excited for this project because it will give me a chance to go out on my own and inspect the sports facilities and give my opinion on what needs to be tended to. Saturday was another great learning day. I was able to sit in on several different meetings throughout the day. Something that was very surprising and intriguing to me was that the building owner had to sit in on a scheduling meeting for the upcoming plans associated with CBP -- he's usually nonexistent and pretty hands-off. There are sports teams consisting of soccer, football, and softball coming in from different states and I needed to make sure that they could have access to the facility for the weekend. I did not realize that an athletic director would have to comply with club teams and organizations as well as varsity programs. It was a different type of meeting that I was able to sit in on compared to the other meetings I have been able to observe.
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AuthorThe author of this website, DaSean M. Dykes hails from Cincinnati, OH. He was raised with a deep passion for sports, playing all sports, but only football organizationally. DaSean attended Tiffin University and had a brief stint for the Tiffin Dragons Football team as a defensive end for one season - opted to conclude football career due to disagreements with the culture, coaching, and success rate of the team. After the conclusion of his football career, he found roles on campus working alongside some of the campus' most driven, sports-minded individuals in the Business and Sports Management clubs. DaSean graduated from Tiffin in 2014 with a Bachelors in Sports Administration and is currently completing his MBA in Sports Administration. His ultimate goal is to pursue a position as the Athletic Director at the collegiate level or serve as a board member for the NCAA. Archives
June 2018
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