%0 Journal Article
%T National Survey of Interscholastic Sport Sponsorship in the United States
%A DAVID PIERCE
%A LEIGH ANN BUSSELL
%J Choregia
%D 2011
%I Greek Center for Sport Science Research
%X Due to cuts in educational funding in the United States, interscholastic athletic administrators have turned to corporate sponsorship to fund athletic departments. While the academic literature in sport management has extensively covered corporate sponsorship at the intercollegiate and professional level, the purpose of this paper is to examine the prevalence, nature, and importance of sponsorship to high school athletics in the United States. This paper identified factors that predicted the use of sponsorship, the amount of revenue generated from sponsorship, who is responsible for selling sponsorship, motivators behind not soliciting sponsorship, and the extent to which fundraising and participation fees are utilized to supplement athletic department budgets. The most common form of alternative revenue generation is fund raising (87% of schools followed by), sponsorship (57%) and participation fees (34%). One-third of schools reported using sponsorship in response to budget cuts, and over one-fourth solicited sponsorship to prevent charging participation fees. Results also indicated that while the majority of high school athletic departments solicited corporate sponsorship, administrators were cautious in the so-licitation of sponsorship as evidenced by the small dollar amounts involved and overall impact on the budget, reliance on game program advertisements and facility signage to activate sponsorships, and a lack of outsourcing to sport marketing firms to sell the sponsorships. There is clearly room for growth in the interscholastic sport sponsorship market.
%K Interscholastic athletics
%K corporate sponsorship
%K sport finance
%U http://www.choregia.org/713.pdf