The SPORTEL Rendez-Vous was a rousing success, as every available invitation and ticket was sold-out for the two-day conference. Taking place at the Miami Marriot in Biscayne Bay, the conference served as an opportunity for Sports and Technology executives to network while discussing various topics of their respective industries.
For Anna Lockwood, Vice President of International at Telstra Broadcast Services, it was a chance to meet and greet various executives and share ideas. “I served as a ‘journalist’asking questions, I was moderating a panel discussion which featured various sports leaders in Florida such as Heidi Pellerano from Concacaf, Jose Sotolongo from the Miami Dade Sports Commission, and Angela Suggs of the Florida Sports Foundation,” she told Bolavip.
Lockwood continued by stating: “I think there is quite a bit of difference between sports in Florida than the rest of world… there are a lot of different sports that are trying to penetrate through the traditional Floridian sports scene, as well as nontraditional American sports, such as footvolley and paddle tennis that are popular in Brazil, and South America, so here in Florida, you see traditional and non-traditional sports.”
Anna Lockwood on shaping sports coverage
For Anna Lockwood the coverage of sports begins by telling a good story:“I think for us in sports it is important to figure out how to keep focusing on how we make sports more representative of our audiences. How do we make sports better representative of the people who are watching depending on gender, ethnicity, age, ability… How to tell the stories of a wide variety of people who play sports and compete in sports. We do not only do the Olympics we also do Paralympics, Special Olympics, so how to make sure we are telling those stories across sports.”
Lockwood knows that no matter how good a story is, it is important to convey it through what attracted the viewer in the first place… the game. “I think it is important to have coverage of sports that reflect the audiences who watch sports, so at the moment if it is only male sports we are watching, it doesn’t represent the 50% women audience. In Miami you have the local language coverage, you have the different countries who watch sports here being represented, so it is culture diversity as well as gender diversity.”
When discussing the panel Lockwood moderated, the Telstra VP was satisfied that she was able to cover a wide range of topics:“The discussion that came during the panel was about how we make sure we are telling the stories of the people who compete. There was a statistic that 6% of sports coverage focused on women’s sport and now that has gone up to about 10%… still a very low percentage… (still) that is going up and we are getting great interest and great audience ratings for FIFA and FIBA World Cup’s for women and the women leagues in the US.”