Wanted: Juvenile Delinquents to Grow Flag
Flag has a lot to learn from younger generation...

Imagine pulling into a crowded parking lot filled with trucks and vans plastered with advertisements and loaded with free promotional merchandise.  Walking toward the information booth through a sea of corporate tents marketing products and services, and witnessing a huge digital screen with brackets posted that are instantly updated as games conclude and an infomercial running along side promoting the lasted in apparel and technology for flag football.  Imagine viewing clips of national tournament highlights and player interviews broadcasting on portable screens as you make your way to the field of play.

Imagine approaching your teams’ assigned field and it is perfectly lined right down to the World Championship logo at mid-field; the region in which you are representing is painted in the enzone along with corporate banners peppering a temporary fence surrounding each field with portable bleachers for spectators.  Imagine each field supplied with a visible sponsored game clock, official score keepers and statisticians and most importantly, the best the country has to offer, all facing off in one event, for one title.

This is what sports such as Snowboarding and Motor X currently offer and what the Flag Football World Championships are striving for, nothing less.  Sponsors crave to be part of big things and the participants of the X Games cleaned up, repositioned and represented their sport because they knew that’s how opportunities are created and ESPN found them. 

"When we started (the X Games) in 1995, people thought we were doing an Olympics for juvenile delinquents," says ESPN senior vice president Ron Semiao, who got the idea for the X Games when he noticed the old sailor coming home from the sea in Old Spice TV ads in 1993 had been replaced by windsurfing action. - by Michael Hiestand, USA TODAY

Yes, flag football represents that old sailor from the past; old, dirty and out dated.  While the X Games represents youth, speed, and style.  Other amateur sports are streamlining their game, like in-line speed skating, while flag is staggering along like an 8 year old on roller-skates with the big eraser-toe brake.

Now personally, I just can’t see how a group of young “juvenile delinquents” figured out how to position and market their sport well enough, to attract outside interest, which jumpstarted their sport towards becoming an International, 2 Billion dollar industry within a 10-12 year period; and then you have a group of (educated), grown men playing a sport (for over 20 years in some cases) who can’t even take a sport that was created in the image of the most popular, most viewed, and most effectively marketed sport in the country – Football, off an 30 year old Bush-League circuit?  Yes playing behind the local YMCA is Bush-League.

In all honesty, flag football could quite possibly be recognized for implementing some of the dumbest marketing strategies in all of sports.  You have organizations who are literally using prostitution as their primary marketing strategy and others claiming to be giving back, what they took in the first place, and then convincing teams that the nothing they are giving back is something - got it?    

There are hundreds of flag tournaments, all seeking sponsorship dollars, but when you hear the marketing strategies used to promote them, you have to wonder what sponsors are they trying to get?  Welcome to ESPN’s “3rd Annual Where Dat Money At B*$&#! Tournament” sponsored by All-State Insurance, “You’re in Good Hands”.  Try selling that idea to someone in corporate. 

The problem is, flag has had the worst marketing ideas behind it for years and its getting worse, but teams are expecting more from the game.  Unfortunately it does not work that way.  The more you give to the game, the more the game gives back – the more you take, the less you get in return. 

The best way to market off the field is on the field (clean it up), and the best way to keep it growing and moving in the right direction is to attract the next group players (Generation Y) that are coming up; team with them and incorporate their ideas.  It’s hard to believe that no one ever figured out this simple concept in over 30 years, but they figured out how to successfully implement an escort service in a flag football business.   

Sooner or later the game is going to move on, with or without us and when it does, all the history, achievements, and glory will vanish on the expired domains in which they reside.  More athletes with improved systems and schemes will emerge, better technology and marketing will support it and the media and more corporate sponsors will embrace it.  

And then many will see that over the last 10+ years, flag football really was out thought, out maneuvered, out marketed and flat out done by a group of “juvenile delinquents”.