Youth sports is facing a crisis that threatens the ecosystem of youth sports. Innovation—the ability to generate and execute new ideas—is needed to stem the negative tide of a declining and aging officiating pool and improve the recruitment and retention of sports officials. Without creative problem solving and innovation by many different stakeholders in youth sports, the benefits that children receive from participating in sports are threatened by the lack of qualified officials to referee competitive games and matches. This case pushes students well past the news headlines of angry parents yelling at officials and deep into several problem spaces that emerge from the application of design thinking. Students are introduced to design thinking and prompted to innovate solutions to problems framed using the design thinking process. Students can select a preidentified problem space, then work through an ideation session facilitated by the instructor.

Students are placed into a consulting role with SPT, a sport marketing agency hired to help a sports organization create a new strategy for video content creation on social media. Students are provided a large data set in Tableau with analytics that hold the key to increasing the team’s engagement and views of videos on social media. Can your students find the insights in the data to drive a new video strategy for social media? Can they turn those insights into a creative content plan that will engage and win fans in the future? Students will have the opportunity to demonstrate creativity and innovation, data-based decision making, and digital literacy.