Take it out to the ball game
June 6th, 2008
I watched lot of softball this week on the NCAA Women’s College World Series. It turns out that Katie Burkhart, the pitcher of the winning Arizona Sun Devils - is a very successful personal marketing practitioner. For starters, she’s been visualizing herself playing in this tournament in an Arizona State uniform since she was a little girl!
According to the announcers, she spent a lot of time working on her mental game in the past year, and one of the tactics she now uses is to write messages to herself on the back of her glove, to remind her of thoughts that help her focus out on the pitching mound during the game. How cool is that? I briefly saw a close-up shot of her glove during one game and counted several different messages.
Whatever she’s doing, it’s working. Her performance was amazing during the whole series, and she pretty much blew out Texas A&M in the final two games for the national championship.
Katie Burkhart is the real deal! Burkhart was a magician on the mound for the entire Women’s College World Series–exactly what you would expect from a pitcher of her caliber, and exactly what it takes to win it all. Burkhart pitched 35 of 35 innings played by Arizona State during the tournament–5 complete games. She only allowed 15 hits and 2 runs TOTAL during those 5 games, and she struck out 54 batters. Striking out 54 batters in 7 games means that Burkhart personally accounted for 51% of all the total outs recorded by Arizona State.
Wow. Where do you need to consistently pull off peak performance to achieve an important goal? How could you embed a couple of ads right there where you need them?
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