Action sports athletes as entrepreneurs: Female professional wakeboarders, sponsorship, and branding

Abstract

This teaching case explores the sport of wakeboarding to examine how its female practitioners need to become entrepreneurial in order to make a living from the sport. Students ponder the financial pressures of becoming a professional female wakeboarder, and how to sustain momentum once one turns professional. The significance and inter-relationship of sponsorship and self-branding/promotion figure prominently. Costs of competing are high in the best of circumstances, and nearly insurmountable without corporate backing. Obtaining such support requires a healthy degree of marketing oneself. The female riders offer a number of anecdotes and recollections providing salience to issues concerning sustainability and gender inequity. Male riders may earn up to four times more on tour than female riders and there is pressure to adapt to the “boys’ club” to advance one's career. Earning a living through involvement in wakeboarding is difficult for women. Models of entrepreneurism are provided to guide student discussion in developing strategies to overcome issues for female wakeboarders making the sport financially attractive for female competitors.

Keywords:

• Female athletes
• Entrepreneurs
• Branding
• Sponsorship
• Action sports

Notes

1 Tel.: [phone].

2 Tel.: [phone].

3 Tel.: [phone].

4 Suffice to say that Knight's ideas concerning risk and uncertainty spawned an enormous literature in economics and finance concerning what precisely he meant by these terms and what the implications are. It will probably help the conversation to allow students to use “risk” and “uncertainty” interchangeably, as in the vernacular.

5 Rosa Parks was an activist in the U.S. civil-rights movement.

6 Curt Flood was a U.S. Major League Baseball player and a pioneer in labor rights for players.

7 The interview questions are available per request. They are too long to be included in the manuscript.

8 For example, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) dates to 1881 and the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) was founded in 1929.