Jordan High’s sports marketing helps make Xfinity games a success

Angela Short, a marketing teacher at Jordan High School, is always looking for fun ways to get her sports marketing class involved in advertising. So when she was contacted by Real Salt Lake to get the word out and for her students to be involved in the half-time show for the Alta and Jordan Xfinity games which were held at Rio Tinto Stadium on Sept. 24, she was really excited.

Short presented the idea to her class with a challenge to come up with the best ideas they could. The students with the top 10 ideas would then be the ones who got to perform for the show

“Once they came up with their ideas for the half-time show, Rio Tinto liked them enough that they said they wanted to have them perform at the soccer game the week before. So, during the soccer game, the 10 of them performed in front of everybody,” Short said. “This was an opportunity of a lifetime, it was so fun!”

Part of the assignment involved speaking to Real Salt Lake Marketing Director Angela Teran to learn how to advertise through social networking. Students were able to effectively spread the word through Facebook and texting, and then also made posters to put around the school.

Braden Dean, one of the 10 advertising students, filmed a commercial about the game, which was displayed on the Real Salt Lake website and youtube.com.

“He is my genius filmer,” Short said of Braden’s hard work.

“This opportunity with Real was more about advertising for the football game, but performing at the soccer game just ended up being a big perk,” another student, Connor Thompson said.

Tension was high as the students got ready to make their way out to a field of 20,000 people in the stands waiting for an impressive half-time show.

“Everyone kept getting really nervous,” student Danielle Forbush said

The show was set up to be kind of a fake rivalry between Alta and Jordan High.

“It was like our SBOs against theirs doing an obstacle course. Only the funny thing is we just had our students dressed up in their attire,” Short said.

Several of the students dressed up like Alta Hawks to play Jordan in the obstacle courses they had set up. Alta lost, which the students jokingly agreed was deserved since they weren’t there to defend themselves.

 The cheers from the sold-out crowd of Real fans made the 10 of them feel like they did a wonderful job.

All agreed that this experience is one they will remember for a lifetime and that their hard work and effort seemed to pay off.

“It was definitely something I would love to do again,” Student Body President Emran Behashti said.

The other students involved were Colin Dutson, Bailey Minson, Lyndsee Armstrong, Steve Sprague and Christian Monson.