Nameless Jerseys

When I was growing up few NFL teams had the player’s last names on their jerseys. Needless to say, names on college jerseys were even more elusive than the ivory-billed woodpecker. It was with great relief to me when that changed. At last, I could identify players without having a program, a number-to-name cheat sheet, or a pathological reliance on the announcers or my memorization skills. This trend spread to many other professional and college sports. Oh sure, there were always a few hold-outs…some schools maintaining tradition, and other teams not wanting the expense of personalization.

Last year, when I saw the Tennessee Women’s Basketball Team take to the court with no jersey personalization–after years with names on player’s uniforms–I was deeply saddened. 2004 will forever be, for me, the year when women’s sports took a small step backward.

The cry was issued: It’s a team sport–we want our players to think of themselves as one part of a team, and not as a group of individuals. Hogwash. Except for the first issuing of jerseys to new players, no one on the team really notices. What it does do is make the sport less accessible to the casual and special-event fans–precisely the people who have to be won over in order to help the sport to thrive. Even for us die-hard old-timers…teams that we don’t religiously follow, and teams that don’t get as much media time as others, are done a disservice. Why? Because the fact of the matter is we root both for teams AND players.

Who cares? The programs should. While winning records are fantastic locally–they put butts in the seats, and garner some local media attention–it’s the stars that bring in the national audience (i.e. TV ratings). It doesn’t matter if it’s men’s or women’s sports. Marginalizing the importance of stars is bad marketing.

Look at the ratings of championship games/series. Rivalries are the best, of course, but the audience is very selective about which pairs of teams are generally recognized as important enough to warrant “rivalry” status. Winning records? Pretty much all the teams at this part of a season have winning records. So what makes the difference between year-to-year ratings? Personalities. You need the stars. And, by extension, you need the non-fanatics to be able to recognize the stars…not just in these season-end games, but throughout the season in order to build the interest in the first place.

My public plea to all of those teams who recently stopped personalizing their jerseys…please rethink this policy. Many sports are in desperate need of growing the fan base. This is in the long-term interests of everyone. Would the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team have been so successful with the public coming out of the 1990s if the newly-acquired interest was squelched because it was difficult to know which player was Julie Foudy, which was Michelle Akers, and which was Mia Hamm? The team’s record doesn’t need me to bolster it (I hope), but I wonder if it would have been as popular if these gifted player’s names weren’t plastered on the backs of their jerseys. Did it make them play less like a team?

This is an issue I hope sports marketing departments seriously consider…and then do it the way I want :-) .