Committee Helps UW-Milwaukee Club Sports Teams Grow Apparel Sales

Exchanging volunteer work for space at the UWM Bookstore or Neebo to sell UW-Milwaukee club teams’ apparel was one of topics discussed at the Sports Clubs Outreach and Fundraising Committee meeting on April 14.

The goal: To help club teams at UW-Milwaukee raise more money by getting their apparel to customers – like UW-Madison does.

The Sports Clubs Outreach and Fundraising Committee consists of three members at the moment, Committee chair, Mike Armstrong, Marketing Supervisor, Chloe Rogers and Social Media Supervisor, Shannah Schumacher. This committee aids UW-Milwaukee’s recreational clubs in raising money through marketing, fundraising, outreach and social media..

The committee discussed mandating that all club teams have a more universal name. All clubs will have to have “UW-Milwaukee Club” followed by the sport name. For example instead of the Ultimate Frisbee’s team name being Black Cat Ultimate they will have to be called UW-Milwaukee Club Ultimate Frisbee. This will allow students to more easily find club pages and create less confusion.

The main topic of discussion at Tuesday’s meeting dealt with club apparel merchandise. During the meeting, Armstrong came up with the idea of having teams do volunteer work in exchange for space in the UWM Bookstore or Neebo to sell their apparel.

Recently, the committee changed its budget policy for club sports. The committee is now requiring that a portion of the clubs’ needed funds must be collected and earned themselves, so “for example if a team’s budget is $2,000, we may only give them $1,500, and they would have to come up with the rest,” said Armstrong.

Having apparel sold at these stores and giving all the proceeds to the club teams could really help these teams raise this extra money, he said.

Two students and members of UW-Milwaukee’s Black Cat Ultimate, Jack Sussman and Alec Lenczner-Bagdasarian think this idea is great and would be willing to volunteer in exchange for their apparel being sold at these stores, “I would love for our apparel to be sold to the city of Milwaukee,” said Lenczner-Bagdasarian.

In fact, many teams already encourage their members to volunteer. For example, Black Cat Ultimate requires their players to do 10 hours of volunteer work in order to be included on certain trips. For example, Lenczner-Bagdasarian did volunteer work helping children with disabilities and Sussman served food at a homeless shelter for 10 hours so that they could go on this year’s spring break trip to Pensacola, Florida.

If the plan goes through, Armstrong doesn’t believe that the sale’s profits will be great the first couple years. He hopes though that in the future the club’s apparel sales would be comparable to UW-Madison’s, whose clubs make up to six figures in their apparel sales.

Although this school is much larger than UW-Milwaukee, “the goal is to grow our clubs and also grow our fundraising to something like that,” said Armstrong. Armstrong also feels that selling club apparel through a storefront may give UW-Milwaukee clubs an edge since UW-Madison only does their sales through the Internet.
Armstrong said that he came up with this idea during the meeting so there are many steps that must be taken first.

One of the hurdles that needs to be overcome is getting these stores to allow space for the teams’ apparel. There was even discussion of attempting to get a deal with stores like Kohl’s, Target and Wal-Mart. The committee will be meeting next Tuesday to create a presentation with details of this plan for the General Board. They are hoping that the plan is accepted for the betterment of UW-Milwaukee and the community that surrounds it.