JOHANNESBURG - Catering for millennials is all the rage, from news organisations to sporting codes looking for ways to captivate a generation that seemingly has the attention span of a goldfish.
Shorter versions both journalism and traditional sports are introduced, while fan engagement has been added to marketing gobbledygook. Trends about sports sponsorship suggest codes like tennis and athletics are low on millennials’ priority list.
Fortunately for Tennis SA they have a roped in a chief executive, Richard Glover, who is young enough to speak to millennials and experienced in enough to interpret the gibberish the marketing types like to use.
Four months into his role as TSA CEO, Glover has already managed to secure a few sponsors for the Davis Cup team, while he has a few more waiting in the wings.
Sharing his vision for the sport over the next eight years, Glover spoke about the new TSA, and one senses the winds of change blowing through tennis.
Once one of the country’s top performing sports on the global stage, SA tennis has slid down the international rankings and almost out of the national consciousness.
Former players keen to plough back into the game were snubbed to the detriment of the sport, and youngsters looking to follow in their footsteps.
Speaking to the media following South Africa’s 4-1 Davis Cup victory over Estonia, Wayne Ferreira, the golden boy of South African tennis in the 90s, said there were positive signs that the federation was willing to seek the advice of former players.
Ferreira consulted the team after Davis Cup captain and close friend Marcos Ondruska managed to convince him to lend a hand.
This week Glover revealed Ferreira’s Olympic gold medal doubles partner Pietie Norval and former world doubles number-one Danie Visser were among South African greats on a high-performance task force.
Although some sports have athletes’ commissions, the athletes’ say in the running of the sport or the experience of former stars are largely ignored by administrators.
For the so-called Cinderella sports like tennis, swimming and athletics to survive and draw sponsors they need to offer a clear plan of how they are best going to utilise the investment.
“People ask me what have we done to get sponsors onboard, it is quite simple really, we have shown sponsors we have a vision and we have a plan,” Glover said.
“There are a lot of people in corporate South Africa who want a reason to believe in sports federations.”
Therein lies a major stumbling block for federations that have certainly not been bastions of corporate governance.
Athletics SA and Swimming SA are currently operating without any sponsors and will have to take a leaf out of what tennis has done.
As Glover has alluded to, it is still early days, and his success or failure can be assessed later down the line.
There is at least some positive news coming out of the sport and at the end of the day he will be judged in terms of the amount of South Africans breaking it into the world rankings.
Athletics and swimming are in slightly different positions, where they have the athletes performing - with hardly any help from the federations - but fail to capitalise on the fact.