Sometimes the most ingenious ideas in sports marketing come from the unlikeliest of places. Consider this totally hypothetical scenario…

Imagine you are attending the NCAA Men’s Lacrosse National Championship game at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium and you are not familiar with the Revolutionary War era tangle of streets. You see a bright yellow sign with two words on it: Closest Parking. Sweet. You pull in and although the price you pay elicits a bit of a wince, you know you’re a short walk from the stadium on a 90 degree day. You walk in the general direction of the stadium and in three blocks you come across a bright yellow sign with two words on it: Closest Parking. Three more blocks – another bright yellow sign with two words on it: Closest Parking. Knowing you’ve been had, you stop and ask the guy waving cars into the lot “How can every parking lot be the one closest to the stadium?” He smiles conspiratorially and says “Closest Parking’s just the name of the company”. Brilliant.

And this also from the intersection of sports and capitalism…
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A men’s lacrosse field, like we men ourselves, is a simple-minded thing – there are sidelines, end lines, the attack area, a restraining line and a goal crease. That’s it. So as I sat in Towson State University’s Johnny Unitas Stadium awaiting the beginning of the NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Championship game between Northwestern University and the University of Maryland, the sight of various unfamiliar markings on the field made it clear to me that this was going to be a somewhat different game. For instance, extending out from each goal were lines creating a shape that can best be described as the aerial view of a baseball diamond, with home plate being the mouth of the goal. Further out from the goal was a semi-circle that wrapped all the way around the environs of the goal. Curious about this, I sought information from Steve Taylor, a women’s lacrosse coach and event organizer who, as luck would have it, happened to be seated right next to me. And Steve was more than happy to serve as a handy reference guide.
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It’s 5:30 in the evening and the temperature is still north of 80 degrees. And as they say in these parts, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”. These parts is Towson, Maryland, the home of Towson State University and site of the NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Championships. The Bird and I had crossed the country to take in this, the first of a collegiate lacrosse championship two-fer – the women’s title game tonight and the men’s tomorrow, just 30 miles down the road in Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium.
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