Sponsorship season

All around the country, marketing managers' inboxes are being flooded by 15 year olds who want blue handlebars, by aging and increasingly irrelevant has-beens trying to squeeze a couple more years out of their past success, and by "team managers" for regional and junior development Cat 2 race teams.

Or as I like to call them, "buyers clubs."

The amount of self-aggrandizement, unwarranted stoke, and lack of self-awareness being unleashed right now makes American Idol tryouts look like AA's confession night. The misspellings alone make a fourth grade spelling bee look like a Harvard study group.

The only people who aren't sending in resumes are the real athletes. There's two reasons for this. First, real athletes are relevant and most people in the industry already know them, but second, a lot of real athletes are mouth-breathing neanderthals and don't know what a resume is. Of course correlation isn't causation, but for instance, there's a strong correlation between my ability to type coherent sentences and my apparent inability to qualify at a World Cup.

Ogre from "Revenge of the Nerds" or Sam Dale on a bad hair day? We report, you decide.

So if you find yourself short on race results this October but you still need to line up #freeshitbro for next year, there's a right way and a wrong way to do this dance. Given that we're in the 21st century, consider a demo roll or video resume. It's a nice change of pace for marketing managers who are used to reading page after page of race results and flipping through black and white photocopied images on cheap printer paper. With the power of music harnessed in your video, you have the ability to set the emotional tone for whoever is watching your resume. Video resumes show that you're fluent in new media, a necessary visual language for anyone in the marketing business.


Done correctly, a video resume can really set you apart from the competition: