Blythe Lawrence of examiner.com had a brilliant idea recently - start a McLaughlin Group for gymnastics. The concept is to get gymnastics bloggers from around the world to contribute their thoughts and insights to a series of questions about the sport and its personalities that will be posted sporadically throughout the year. We're into the first round of questions and I'll be posting snippets of the discussion here on gymnastike as each of the new questions are published. 

The first round of questions included this one about the popularity of men's NCAA gymnastics, a super high level sport that just doesn't get the fan recognition it deserves. Here's Blythe's question: 
If you were hired as a consultant for men's NCAA gymnastics programs, what would you tell them to do to improve exposure and meet attendance?

Here was my answer:
1) Build relationships within your community. Get out to your local elementary schools and do exhibitions for them, meet and talk to the kids and parents, then personally invite them to your meet. This is how both Utah and Georgia built their women's gymnastics following and Utah still does this on a consistent basis. If you establish personal connections with these people you are giving them a vested interest in you and your team. Then, once you get them to your meets make it fun for them and give them a reason to come back!

2) The men's NCAA coaches need to run their programs like a business. They have 2 equal jobs as head coach- one is to market your program and ensure that collegiate gymnastics thrives, the other is to well, coach.

3) Continued exposure of your program and your gymnasts. I don't mean slapping a few competition videos on a youtube page, I mean introducing your athletes and the personalities of your team to the gymnastics community so that fans can feel a personal connection to them as people as well as gymnasts.

I also loved Ron Noe's answer: 
Ron Noe (Stick It Media):  "Get the respective business schools onboard to create marketing plans for the teams. This would make for a great project for a student or group of students, and would be a win-win for both parties. The list of promotional ideas is endless, and could easily be communicated via social media.
The schools with world-class talent (Olympic hopefuls) are sitting on wonderful assets to promote".... 
...."If none of these ideas work, a combo 10-cent beer night and win a date with Alicia Sacramone contest would be gold!"

Many of the bloggers went with sex appeal, suggesting the guys go shirtless. Others like Rick McCharles of gymnasticscoaching suggested combining their events with women's NCAA meets. This could work and I know it's already working at University of Illinois-Chicago. 

An interesting discussion. I don't think there is one answer to solve the problem, but I think it's worth it to apply a combination of these things to our fledgling NCAA programs.
What do you think?

Continue reading on Examiner.com: The Discussion: How to better market men's NCAA gymnastics? - National Gymnastics | Examiner.com 

Also related: Gymnastics Marketing 101 on Gymnastike: How the Top Teams created a Following