CHICAGO, July 1—Hill & Knowlton is partnering with Team Marketing Report, a publisher of sports marketing and sponsorship information, to provide broad consulting and communications services to clients in the sporting world.
 
Team Marketing Report will work with Hill & Knowlton’s higher education and sports marketing practices. Prospects will include collegiate athletic departments, professional sports teams, and individual players and coaches, as well as corporate sponsors of sports events. The two partners will offer counsel on crisis planning and media communications to broad marketing strategy.
 
“With media paying more attention to sports figures on an off the field, athletes are living in a fishbowl,” says Sallie Gaines, senior managing director in the Chicago office of H&K. “Players, especially at college level, are too often unprepared for the loss of privacy, and they handle the attention poorly. We can guide them in practical ways of cultivating positive relationships with journalists—a benefit that can have a lasting impact on their lives.”
 
Gaines will lead the partnership from the H&K side, working closely with Dan Migala, executive vice president at Team Marketing Report.
 
“We’re solving a problem that few have stopped to recognize,” says Migala. “Sponsors are crucial to the financial success of any team—including those at the college level. But there’s been little effort to educate players, coaches, and others on the team side about the business of sports, so they often don’t understand and appreciate the sponsors.”
 
Adds Gaines, “Every organization, even a sports team, knows it can face a crisis, but unless there’s a plan in place, a crisis can cause paralysis.”