I'm a sucker for documentaries that show the 'rise and fall' of military
empires, businesses and the like. I love seeing the plan that made
these giants possible, then what changed that led to the inevitable
decline.
So when I saw that ESPN was going to have a special
titled 'The U' on how Miami Hurricanes football became a juggernaut in
the 1980s, I had to watch. Now let me have a disclaimer here; the Canes
in the 80s were brash, cocky, arrogant, and much of what their players
did was a complete embarrassment to college football, in my opinion. I
wasn't interested in the special from that angle, I wanted to see what
happened to take a football program from all but being closed in the
late 70s, to being the dominant program in the country just a few years
later.
To give this story a baseline and some perspective, in
the late 70s, support for Miami's football program was so low that the
school ran promotions with local Burger Kings to give away a free
football ticket if you bought a Whopper! The school was about ready to
drop the football program when it hired Howard Schnellenberger in 1979.
Schnellenberger had tutored under two of the greatest football coaches
of all-time, Bear Bryant at Alabama and Don Shula at the Miami Dolphins.
When
Schnellenberger arrived in Miami, he immediately started putting his
fingerprints over the entire program. His first goal was to 'win back'
the city of Miami. Racial and economic tensions had divided the city in
the early 80s, and left the entire area looking for an identify to
unify it.
And Schnellenberger saw that potential identity as
being the Miami Hurricanes football team. He purposely focused almost
all of his recruiting efforts on getting football players from
inner-city Miami, and the surrounding areas. He did that because as he
explained, he wanted to recruit kids from South Florida that wanted to
play in front of their friends and family, so they would be in the
stands cheering on these players.
Schnellenberger's staff called
South Florida 'The State of Miami', and told his staff to saturate that
area of the state with their recruiting efforts. What happened was that
kids from Miami started committing to play football at Miami, and then
started calling their friends at other local schools and told them to
come to Miami as well.
And the Miami community noticed that
Schnellenberger was going into rough, inner city areas of Miami, and
recruiting kids that other schools wouldn't touch. That began to
resonate with the Miami community, and they began to respect
Schnellenberger and in the process, the community began to adopt the
Miami team as their own. Because it was.
"By the mid 80s, the Hurricanes were Miami's team" - Billy Corben, Director of The U
In
1983, the Miami Hurricanes won the school's first football National
Championship. And the key was, that title was won with LOCAL players.
An area that had been engulfed in strife and division, now had a reason
to come together, and Schnellenberger instilled a sense of pride, of
local pride, in the Miami program.
What does all of this have to
do with your company's efforts to build an on or offline community? The
lesson learned here is to give the people you are trying to reach, a sense of ownership in something larger than themselves.
Schnellenberger did NOT recruit the best players in the country, he
recruited the best players in Miami, specifically because he wanted
LOCAL players. He wanted the mamas and daddies of these players to be
in the stands cheering their sons on. He wanted the Miami community to identify with this team.
And they did. Remember that lesson when you are trying to create your community-building efforts.
By: Mack Collier for The Viral Garden.