SITA Helping Hands
I’m sure many of you are aware of the devastating damage done in the mid-west by the floods these past several weeks. There are thousands of people who have lost everything and are starting over. One of the many charities that is near and dear to our heart here at Nfinity, is the SITA Emergency Relief Fund. This fund was established to have money available to provide assistance to cheer programs that are in need. And there are many programs who watched everything they had get swept away by the floods. Mats, uniforms, poms, equipment – all of it down the mighty Mississippi.

Nfinity supports this cause and is asking our community to step up and help those in need. Please rally your cheerleaders and parents. Organize fund raisers. All monies collected are used to assist cheerleading programs who have suffered major setbacks and need help. If we can't help our own in times of crisis who will? For information on how to donate to the SITA Emergency Relief Fund go to www.spiritindustrytrade.com.


Myteam411.com
We told you about it last month. We have seen the Beta site. And it is everything we had wanted and more. Myteam411.com is an on-line communication tool for teams. It allows you to put all of the team schedules on line so that everyone has access to them. But the best part is, if you need to change a time all you do is change it on the calendar and everyone on the team and their parents get a text message and email notifying them of the change. And the coach can do that from their phone. It’s that easy. For more information go to www.coachescloset.net and click on the Myteam411.com logo.

A Love Story Part 3
For our new readers to the Shoe Review, our CEO, Tate Chalk, the ultimate bachelor, is finally getting married. And because everyone enjoys a good love story, we’ve convinced his bride to be, Grace, to share the story of how they met. So we are doing this in chapters. Today is chapter 3….

“Most stories would have ended there, but the next day a huge bouquet of flowers arrived with a card from Tate asking me to dinner…in Chinese. I was touched that someone I’d spent 5 minutes in conversation with would put more effort in to this gift than my boyfriend had in four years. I was incredibly disappointed that I was morally obligated to decline, but I called and thanked him for the gesture and sadly said “no”. He graciously accepted the rejection and asked that I call him if my situation ever changed. Jim wasn’t particularly pleased that I’d received flowers from another man, but rather than improve his behavior he thought it a better use of his energy to destroy the sweet note and toss the pieces in the garbage. Again, any other story should end here, but thankfully it didn’t.”

For those of you who want more details, you can check it out at www.tateandgrace.com.

Eat to Compete
Each month we publish a chapter from “Eat to Compete” – a book on the role that proper nutrition plays in the life of an athlete. When you add teenage girls in the mix as athletes the pressure on them to stay thin is much greater. So this month we continue with looking at the role of carbohydrates in the diet of an athlete. This month we digest (no pun intended) what percentage of carbs an athlete needs and how many carbs are in the food that we eat. Click Here to check it out. For the complete book Eat to Compete go to www.eattocompete.com.

Final Thought
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past year, everyone knows that there are now two players in our industry – Varsity Brands and Jam Brands. And these aren’t small companies. With the recent Baseball All Star Game, it kind of reminds me of the whole American League/National League thing.

The American League is clearly the dominate league now. They’ve won 7 of the last 10 World Series and they’ve won 11 of the last 12 All Star Games with the only exception being the now infamous Bud Selig “Tie” in 2002. They’ve got all the home run hitters. They have the power pitchers. They have the bigger cities. And you have to ask yourself the question – is it good for Major League Baseball?

Jam Brands has acquired 10 companies that were previously independently owned and operated and Varsity has 14. That’s a total of 24 companies that had private ownership, making their own decisions about how to run their company based on what their customers wanted. Are the days of the small “Mom & Pop” company gone? Are you going to be forced to choose? Can you go to an event for one company and still be allowed to compete at the other?

In a free market society, the market dictates what happens. When the market goes down the weak go out of business and at the same time the strong get stronger. Both of these companies are well respected in the industry. They have solid management teams in place. They allow the individual companies to maintain their brand identify that made them successful in the first place. There continue to be enough differences between them that you feel like you’re at a different event.

So I ask the question – which one of these companies is the American League? And it is good for cheerleading?

I would love to hear your take on this. Please email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Cheers!
David Marler

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