Donald Tucker has looked at a lot of video boards over the past seven months. As the executive director of the Springdale Athletic Foundation gazed into one LED screen after another, he was really looking for opportunities. First, to enliven the athletic facilities that serve as the “front porch” of Springdale (Ark.) Public Schools with state-of-the-art video boards. Second, to put that technology to immediate use generating sponsorship revenue toward an ultimate nine-figure fundraising goal in support of SPS athletics at large.
The Springdale Athletic Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit organization, was founded in 2012 as a sort of hobby among volunteers. But the changing high school athletics landscape — namely, the visible investments being made by Springdale’s peer institutions — dictated that the foundation board get serious, and so it made Tucker its salaried full-time leader.
“Everybody else around us who we compete against, they’re taking this to the next level, and we have to be one or two steps ahead,” says Tucker, in his first year as executive director. “We’ve started reinvesting in Springdale Public Schools athletics. We have an initiative to raise $100 million, and the first step of that initiative are these video scoreboards that we’re doing with Digital Scoreboards. Of all the things we’re going to be spending money on, these are the only things that are going to generate money back to us. Everything else, as it relates to this $100 million project, is an expense.”
The initial step involved a rigorous vetting of video board providers.
“It consumed six of us for about seven months — really researching, traveling and looking at boards, and talking to athletic directors and booster clubs to kind of find out what they learned. ‘What are you guys doing? Who did your boards? Do you like them? How are you paying for them?’ — all of those kinds of conversations,” Tucker says. “We ended up talking with 11 different video board companies locally, regionally and nationally. We went to look at their product unbeknownst to them and had conversations that you can’t really have in front of those companies, because you need the honesty. We invested a lot of time and effort, because you can’t do this twice. We had to get it right the first time.”
In the end, Springdale chose Columbia, Ill.-based Digital Scoreboards, and not just because its products, with their perfectly aligned panels and crystal-clear optics, would represent a major upgrade to the district’s existing video boards, whose panels had faded in varying degrees to the point imagery started to resemble a giant quilt, according to Tucker. More than that, Springdale found in Digital Scoreboards a true partner.
“It was really a paradigm shift for us,” Tucker says. “Whether it’s video boards or turf or whatever, we’ve always been hyper-focused on the product. When we met with Chris Kirn, the owner of Digital Scoreboards, it was at that moment that we started focusing on the owners, the people who run the business. We kept filtering them through this big funnel — warranty, product — but it boiled down to character and integrity. I felt going forward that we kind of learned something here. We learned that we want to do business with people that we want to be friends with. If the relationship is there, they’re going to take care of you, and the product will take care of itself.”
Springdale purchased Digital Scoreboard products — from 26-by-52-foot stadium boards to 31-inch-by-40-foot arena ribbon boards — for seven different facilities at the district’s two high schools. Now, representatives of schools from as far away as Colorado and Pennsylvania have come to experience in person Springdale’s new video board technology.
It didn’t take long for Tucker to realize he had made the right choice with the district’s $3.3 million investment.
“We were coming into the baseball season and had a conversation with Chris Kirn. ‘These teams are supposed to compete for state championships, nationally ranked, and we’d love to give the seniors the chance to play some games in front of brand-new video boards.’ And he made it happen. He just rallied his team together, they came up with a strategy, and then they installed baseball and softball video boards before the seasons were over. We’re talking three, four weeks from ‘Yes, we’re gonna do business together’ and a signed contract. Typically, stuff like that takes months and months.
“I wish all of our vendors were that way,” Tucker adds. “I really do, because people are just focused on the dollar, and he’s focused on the relationship and taking care of each other. And I think that’s the big difference.”
