Wharton MBA students help Final Four planners

The six first-year MBA students are studying Philadelphia Women's Basketball 2000. When the nets are cut down, the trophies are handed out and the fans head for the exits, will there be anything left from the Women's Final Four in Philadelphia other than fond memories? That is the question six first-year Wharton MBA students are working to answer. Unlike past years, the 2000 Women's Final Four is being organized by a committee independent of the host universities -- Penn and St. Joseph's. That committee, Philadelphia Women's Basketball 2000, hopes to outlive March Madness and continue as a community organization working to promote women's athletics in Philadelphia. The six students chose to work with PWB as their Field Application Project -- a semester-long required course designed to introduce first-year MBAs to unstructured real-life business problems. Most project teams select companies and projects pre-screened by Wharton. The companies each pay $2,500 to Wharton in exchange for the consulting services of an MBA team. Team member Leah Buhl chose instead to use her connections to the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce to arrange a project with PWB, which had its $2,500 fee waived due to its non-profit status. "When we first went in, we said, 'Let's do something with the Final Four,'" group member Preston McGowan said. "What really came out was, 'What's going on after the Final Four?' and we thought that was a much bigger need for PWB." While making it clear that their work is not a comprehensive study, they hope to provide PWB Executive Director Cathy Andruzzi with a plan for how PWB can define and market itself if it lives on after the Final Four is over. As part of the course requirements, the group has met with its faculty advisor and prepared progress reports throughout the semester. The team's final report will not be in its final form until March 27 -- right in the heart of Championship Week. Andruzzi hopes that the team will suggest strategies for continuing PWB's transformation from host committee and corporate logo to a grass-roots oriented community organization. When PWB was formed in 1998, its logo and brand name were a way to sidestep NCAA regulations prohibiting the use of the NCAA logo by anyone other than its national sponsors. In order to increase local corporate support of the Final Four, PWB created its own logo and brand, which can be used by sponsors in their advertising. "We wanted to give the local community a brand to have ownership of," Andruzzi said. PWB's mission, however, goes beyond serving as a corporate logo. It has become active in the community through youth clinics and a women in sports speaker series. Its goals will culminate in a number of community-wide events during Championship Week at the end of March. "Our mission statement is much broader than Championship Week," Andruzzi said. "Our vision is to not just run a great week, but to help grow women's sports? to give young girls an opportunity on a grass-roots level to gain both physical and mental skills." What sort of structure will best serve those goals once the Final Four is over is one of the driving questions behind the Wharton students' project. Although their final report won't be finished until the end of March, the group has some hunches as to what it will recommend. One important decision will be the scope of the future PWB. The group thinks it is best if the organization sticks to promoting basketball, instead of expanding to support multiple sports. "Basketball is really a unifying game," Buhl said. "It goes across a wide range of socio-economic levels. In its efforts, [PWB] still draws attention to women's sports." The group has recently been paring down its focus even further due to the limited time of the semester. With little formal data available about the number of youth basketball leagues in the area, the students have had to use individual interviews with a variety of business and community leaders to gauge the interest in PWB and brainstorm on the ways PWB can organize itself. If PWB can live on past the Final Four, it will be a first for an organizing committee of its type. In previous years, the organizing committees for the Final Four have been more closely linked to the host universities and were designed strictly to support Championship Week. Even though PWB is without precedent, Andruzzi believes that now is a great time to build an organization like PWB. She noted that women's college basketball made a huge leap in popularity when the media-heavy Northeast devoted major news coverage to the University of Connecticut's 1995 undefeated season. As the Women's Final Four has never been held in the Northeast before, Andruzzi hopes to see a similar explosion of attention surrounding this year's final.

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