“Everybody loves sports. Businesses all over the city of a professional sports team benefit from this. On game days, restaurants get busy nights with lots of sales, and hotels get significant business from a sports weekend,” said Wolkowski.
Supervised by U of S Edwards School of Business associate professor Dr. William Murphy , Wolkowski — a graduate student in the Master of Science in Marketing program — investigated how professional sports teams handled communications about pandemic adaptations during their 2020-21 seasons. A global pandemic was an unforeseen event with far greater impact than could be anticipated by organizations, rendering existing crisis preparation processes insufficient to help leagues deal with the crisis.
Wolkowski analyzed the impacts of communications between teams, league headquarters, and other stakeholders during the pandemic. She said NLL upper management succeeded in keeping employees and participants informed as strategies were being developed, and this communication helped to reduce uncertainty for all stakeholders, while keeping personnel motivated.
Wolkowski noted one of the main advantages sports leagues have in their pandemic response efforts is their ability to be extremely adaptive in operations.