Changing the Game: My Career in Collegiate Sports Marketing

by Jim Host, Eric A. Moyen (Primary Contributor)

Many Kentuckians and fans of intercollegiate athletics are familiar with the name Jim Host. As founder and CEO of Host Communications, he was the pioneer in college sports marketing. Host's prevailing innovation in collegiate sports was the concept of bundled licensing, which encouraged corporate partners to become official sponsors of athletic programs across media formats. Host and his team developed the NCAA Radio Network and introduced what became known as the NCAA Corporate Partner Program, employing companies such as Gillette, Valvoline, Coca-Cola, and Pizza Hut to promote university athletic programs and the NCAA at large. Host was involved with the construction of Rupp Arena, the Kentucky Horse Park, and the KFC Yum! Center. But few know his full story.

Changing the Game is the first complete account of Host's professional life, detailing his achievements in sports radio, management, and broadcasting; his time in minor league baseball, real estate, and the insurance business; and his foray into Kentucky politics, including his appointments under governors Louie B. Nunn and Ernie Fletcher. This memoir provides a behind-the-scenes look at the growth of big-time athletics and offers solutions for current challenges facing college sports.

296 pages, Hardcover

Published March 10, 2020

Reviews

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly an amazing career, this book shows how Jim’s hard work, organization skills, and tenacity led to changing college sports. He clearly learned from his experiences and built upon them. The many anecdotes make the book an interesting read.

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Received wisdom holds that Jim Host was a major player in the development of the current marketised form of US College sports through his role as a deviser with the NCAA and various regional sports leagues of models that greatly increased the amount of money going into College sport from the early 1980s. This memoir charts Host’s life from a late Depression era family struggling, through a slightly more prosperous 1950s and the opportunity to get to University through an athletic scholarship. This is a tale presented as hard work, resilience and opportunity as the heart of the ‘American dream’. This is not my genre – memoirs are not my thing other than as part of research projects; memoirs of liberal conservative entrepreneurs far from my usual reading matter.

This does well in terms of the expectations of the genre. Host is thoughtful and reflective, professional in his approach and this is very much his public life. He seems generous, principled and with a powerful ethical stance that fits the conventions of fair play and respect for the other. He presents business transparency as a virtue, as a means of building trust, and accentuates the benefits of long term relationships. The book probably has powerful local resonance in Kentucky and is likely to be useful to sport marketing students as a way into the lives behind the historical narratives in the marketing textbooks.

[Melissa Poynter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book! Jim Host gives us a close up look at how college sports went from a local interest to a multimillion dollar enterprise through his out of the box idea for it to team up with big business and corporate sponsorships. Along the way it is a marketing primer on selling like none I have read before plus a peek behind the scenes of those mega deals between schools, coaches, and media detailing the real Road to the Final Four. Ever wonder how 24/7 sports found its way into your living room? Blame Jim Host’s imagination.

[John B Rttenhouse III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Read!

If you love Kentucky sports and/or politics, this is the book for you! Very humble writing from a man who built a great media empire.

[Lauren]

Read for class this semester :)