UAB Football has matched its best start in school history with a 5-1 record heading into a first-place showdown with Conference USA Western Division rival North Texas this week.
It’s a big week in Birmingham. It’s Homecoming for football, complete with the parade and all the other traditions. And Thursday, the UAB men’s basketball team will host a charity exhibition against the Georgia Bulldogs, during which a banner will be raised honoring the UAB women’s team for its 2017-18 Conference USA championship.
For the past two seasons, the Blazers’ have used Influencer (INFLCR) to great success in telling the story of their return to the gridiron. Now UAB will expand that exposure by agreeing to a deal last week to add men’s and women’s basketball to the contract.
“We couldn’t be more excited to add our men’s and women’s basketball programs to INFLCR,” said Ted Feeley, associate athletics director of communications at UAB. “The influence this product has had on our football program has been substantial, and we look forward to expanding our footprint on the hardwood.”
INFLCR is a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform for sports team properties to store, track and deliver their content across their influencer network of athletes, coaches, former athletes, media, etc.
Each influencer can access their personalized gallery of content on their INFLCR mobile app, which they can use to download and share specific content to their social media platforms, with all influencer user activity tracked back to an INFLCR dashboard for the sports team properties.
UAB football players this season are making great use of the app, downloading and sharing more than 2,000 content items produced by the school since reporting to training camp in August. Last week alone, more than 80 UAB players accessed personalized contact via the INFLCR mobile app.
“We’re really excited about our continuously developing relationship with the University of Alabama at Birmingham athletics program,” INFLCR founder and CEO Jim Cavale said. “UAB was one of our first clients in 2017 when we launched INFLCR, and since then, they have really embraced everything that we’re about.
They put the student-athlete first, and we do too. They prove it by using a product like INFLCR that they invest in not only with their dollars but with their content, so that it can reach all the student-athletes and coaches, and even alums who want it.”
“They are reaching tens of thousands of additional people with INFLCR because that content is getting shared on Instagram and Twitter by these student-athletes, coaches and alums.”
Feeley said he is looking forward to UAB women’s basketball getting on board. UAB is the second women’s basketball program and third women’s sports team signed by INFLCR, joining Troy women’s basketball and Fresno State softball. INFLCR is serving multiple sports for several clients, such as Troy, Fresno State and Purdue.
“Coming off our first-ever C-USA Women’s Basketball Championship, we are honored to be one of the first women’s programs to sign with INFLCR,” Feeley said. “This partnership will allow our student-athletes to share their stories as both programs aim to hang more championships banners in Bartow Arena.”
Cavale said the success UAB has enjoyed with football made it obvious to add additional sports, something other clients have also discovered.
“It was only natural as we went into year two of the partnership, and looked at all the data around daily usage of the INFLCR app by the UAB Football student-athletes and coaches, that we looked at additional UAB sports benefitting from INFLCR,” Cavale said.
“We’re a sport-by-sport investment, and we were happy to be able to get a commitment from UAB to add both men’s and women’s basketball. Men’s basketball has such a big tradition and following here in Birmingham and the women’s program is coming off a championship season that they are really going to be able to leverage. For us to be able to develop our partnership with more sports is exciting for us.
“Ted and the athletic program are forward thinking, and we’re really excited that they’ve made us a part of the innovative strategy that they have. While adding sports is one route of growth, the idea of an athletic department-wide deal is something that we are looking forward to with a lot of our clients that have two, three, four individual sports using INFLCR now.
“We’re excited to announce some athletic department-wide deals in the next few weeks that are going to pioneer college sports with INFLCR and hopefully set a blueprint for us to do a lot more athletic department-wide deals so that we’re not only serving the revenue sports but all the sports, including the women’s sports and Olympic sports that sometimes get overlooked.
Deals like this one, Troy University, Fresno State University — they are big proving ground for us to do more of this with our current clients and new clients in the college sports, high school sports and pro sports realm.”
*If you’d like your men’s and women’s basketball teams to experience the power of INFLCR starting with the 2018-19 seasons, click here to set up a demo.
ABOUT INFLCR
INFLCR is a SaaS platform for sports team properties to store, track and deliver their content across their influencer network of athletes, coaches, former athletes, media, etc. Each influencer can access their personalized gallery of content on their INFLCR mobile app, which they can use to download and share specific content to their social media platforms, with all influencer user activity tracked back to an INFLCR dashboard for the sports team properties. In its first year, INFLCR has signed and renewed software subscription partnerships with more than 20 college, high school and professional sports team properties, including iconic college sports team brands like the University of Miami Football and the University of Kentucky Men’s Basketball. For more information or to request a demo, visit http://3.80.10.35/
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