Maryville Announces a Groundbreaking Naming-Rights Deal

Naming rights are commonplace in academia to the point where institutions of higher learning from the Maricopa Community Colleges to the University of Virginia publish criteria for their administration in their policy manuals. Such deals typically involve facilities, but most universities' policies make note both of facilities and of "academic entities" in their delineation of authority over naming rights, general guidelines, due diligence, duration and "changing circumstances" that could lead to a renaming, un-naming or addition of a second name.

The place you could go to learn about all the nuances of naming-rights deals? One of the 349 sport management programs at universities located all over the United States (the North American Society for Sport Management lists just 62 elsewhere in the world). And yet, amazingly, until Jan. 22 of this year not one of those 349 programs had ever sold their own naming rights. On Tuesday, Maryville University announced a deal with Rawlings Sporting Goods that created the Rawlings Sport Business Management Program, ushering in (perhaps) a new era.

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