Each year, thousands of American families head to local rec centers and athletic complexes to support their young athletes at regional tournaments. They spend hours on the sidelines — most of it waiting and bored.

Marketers call that — an opportunity.

This spring, UGA Entrepreneurship students and UGA Student Industry Fellows were tasked with helping sports management tech firm Fastbreak.AI maximize that time.

Fastbreak.AI, which schedules tournaments and organizes displays for brands to showcase at those tournaments, asked students to find how to reduce the labor and logistics costs of Fastbreak’s brand activations while helping clients track their return on investment.

The semester-long challenge — led by UGA Entrepreneurship Program Associate Director Don Chambers and UGA’s Director of Experiential Learning Andrew Potter — culminated on April 28 when students pitched solutions to Jamal Bevels, general manager of Fastbreak.AI’s

“Fastbreak Connect” brand activation program, and Ford Rainey (BBA ’23), an account manager for Fastbreak.

“There were pieces that we took away from each one of the presentations,” Rainey told the students.

The students’ solutions included automating the activation events and focusing the activation service around select metro regions. The winning pitch came from students who created a scannable ultra-low-cost collectable hang tag that Fastbreak could market.

“Team Ad Tags,” created by undergraduate students Kirsten Roush, Jason Ingeyous, Benjamin Petroff, Christine Tran, and Julian Jaimes, will split the $1,000 grand prize.

Win or lose, the experience of building and pitching a solution to a real problem experienced by a real company is a prize in itself, said Henry Sullivan, who is graduating with an entertainment and media degree this May and begins his MSBA in August.

“It’s a win-win scenario for the company and the students,” Sullivan said. “For the students, you’re getting a real-world experience. To be able to work as a group on a project, to see how we can pool all our different ideas and different backgrounds to contribute to the project, gives us a tangible experience of what it will be like for us post-grad.”  

It also gives them a tangible piece of work they can share with potential employers.

For Rainey, who earned Terry’s Certificate in Entrepreneurship and was a Student Industry Fellow, participated in Chambers and Potter’s pitch contest before he graduated, this spring’s pitch contest was a full circle moment. He credits the design thinking project he created for his contest with helping him land his role at Fastbreak.

All of UGA’s experiential learning and entrepreneurship programs are built on cultivating these connections among alumni, the industries where they work, and current students, said Chambers, who has organized the Design Thinking Pitch contest with his and Potter’s design thinking classes for the last five years.

“We’ve worked really hard to build a circular ecosystem where our students use what they’ve learned here to go out into the world and then come back and contribute to the program,” Chambers said. “It looks like it’s finally coming to fruition.”