Hill

Michael Hill

4-18-2012

6th A.P. Lit./Comp.

Tillery

Senior Project Speech

Imagine yourself in a home without the basics. No electricity. No heat in the

wintertime. Perhaps even no running water. Imagine no home at all. Thousands of people

in Georgia alone have to deal with conditions like this or worse on a daily basis. My

name is Michael Hill and for my senior project I ultimately choose to put on a 3 on 3

basketball tournament with all proceeds going to Creekview’s Habitat for Humanity

Club. I choose this because it was a project that I could explore my interest in business

while staying comfortable with my interest in basketball, and help out a great cause.

The process for the creation of my product began with my research paper. After

all, I had never put on a fundraiser of my own, so I needed to find out everything I could

about how to run one. While some students just do their research paper because they

have to include it in their project, mine was absolutely necessary. My research paper

basically led me to how I was going to set up my fundraiser. I implemented many things

that I learned in my research paper into my actual project. Things like my advertising,

communication, and how the actual tournament was run all came from my research

paper. One specific example is what I learned in my research paper on advertising. At

first, I planned on using a rather generic advertising scheme. However, my research paper

made me reconsider this. I learned specifically about how different texts, color schemes,

and images could attract different audiences. With all this in mind I redesigned my

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advertisements (show visual aid of advertisement). I wanted to make an advertisement

that would draw my audience of teenage athletes and I feel I succeeded greatly in this.

Although my advertisements were ready, I still had things to do before I started

putting them up. One challenge I had was to secure a location for the tournament. After

days of researching different venues I finally settled on a local church with a very nice

indoor gym. Another difficulty was to set up an easy way for people to learn more about

my project after they saw the initial advertisement. My solution to this was to create a

page for a Facebook group titled Creekview 3 on 3 so it would be easy for people to find.

The page provided more detail about the project like the time, date, and location. In

addition to all this, I provided a link to Habitat for Humanity in order to inform people

about where the money raised would go. The Facebook group was also supposed to be

how I was going to communicate with the participants. Unfortunately, this turned out to

be quite a dilemma, arguably the most difficult problem throughout my project.

Thankfully, I was able to solve this problem later on. After the Facebook group was

established I began to place my advertisements. Obviously, I wanted them to get a lot of

attention so I looked carefully over all the places I could put them. Finally, I settled on

placing them throughout the school at various water fountains. This seemed like the best

idea as this was the place that students were most likely to stop and look at a distraction.

Around this time I also began airing my commercial on the school’s news channel.

Word began to spread quickly around school, and soon I was inundated with

inquiries about the tournament. Fortunately, I was well prepared and was able to get a lot

of people interested. Once I had a gauge of how many people were going to be there I

began to plan for the actual day of the event. While this may sound easy, it was actually

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quite time consuming. I created a timeline to let me get a generalization of how long the

games were going to take place. I also had to decide on things like seeding and the

bracket setup. Would certain teams get byes? How would those byes be determined?

Should it be a round robin tournament or a round by round elimination tournament? To

solve these problems, I combined my opinions with opinions that I had collected from

participators in the event. In the end, I decided on a beginning round robin tournament to

seed the teams. The two teams with the best records would get first round byes in the

double elimination tournament. With most of my problems resolved, there was only one

issue left to tackle: the communication. Although I thought the Facebook group would

be a great way to communicate it proved to actually be quite a hindrance. Not everyone

checked the page making it very difficult to attain the things I needed from the

participants, like the participants money and their insurance information. Additionally I

was not able to see everyone in school in order to tell them in person about the things I

needed. This made for a huge mess. Just two days before the tournament only three

people had turned in the necessary items. I was officially freaking out. So I took it upon

myself to inform all of them individually. Through perseverance and some legally

questionable actions I was able to get contact information for everyone in the tournament.

The night before the tournament I got in touch with each participant telling them

everything they needed to bring in order to partake in the event. With the final bullet

dodged, all I had to do was set everything up before the tournament. The tournament

itself was probably the easiest part of my whole project. Everyone brought everything

they needed to and, as you can see in my video, it all went according to plan.

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In conclusion, my senior project helped me learn a lot of things about myself. I

previously thought that I was rigid in planning and had to have everything go exactly as I

planned. However due to all the problems I learned that I was actually quite good at

adapting to the situation at hand. This project was supposed to help me explore my

interest in business, and it definitely achieved that. I will be attending either Georgia

College and State University or Georgia State University with plans to major in business

and specialize in marketing. Even though it was not quite like a business my projects

business aspects definitely fostered my interest in business.

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