Tulane Baseball 2024 AAC Tournament: A Championship Case Study
A UCL tear and Tommy John Surgery sidelined me for the 2024 season - but it also gave me the opportunity to drive Tulane Baseball’s creative strategy during my rehab. Here’s how I created record-breaking photo and video content for @GreenWaveBSB while telling players’ stories and documenting a championship season.
After a regular season that saw the Green Wave finish 3rd in the American Athletic Conference, all eyes turned to Clearwater, Florida as the Wave sought to defend their 2023 AAC Tournament Championship. Having successfully created viral content documenting critical moments in the Wave season - including 242.7k views on Instagram from Tulane’s sweep of #6 East Carolina - I was tasked with running point on documenting Tulane’s title defense.
My Tulane Baseball content strategy was simple - combine striking visuals, clever captions, and bubbly player personalities to amplify both the Tulane Baseball and individual players’ brands. The goal was to not only provide on-field highlights, but to help fans connect with and build relationships with players.
With a baseline from the 2023 AAC Tournament Run that saw the Green Wave defeat the ECU Pirates in the championship game, we can compare how effective the strategy was in 2024 compared to the year previous. 2023 saw Tulane Baseball post 6 videos en route to the title, with 3 posts coming on Championship Sunday - these posts totaled 108.5k views on Instagram, for an average of 18.1k per post.
As for 2024, we made 11 video posts*, totaling 212.3k views, or 19.3k views per post. On Championship Sunday alone, 6 posts produced 119.4k views - an average of just under 20k per video. Not only were we able to increase post frequency, but we did so without sacrificing engagement.
Increasing post frequency was another marker of my time driving creative strategy for Tulane Baseball - regardless of player role, if there was a moment that warranted documentation and publication, it was my mission to ensure that story was told in real time. As a frequent solo shooter, that presented a challenge - create polished, post-worthy content in-game while also continuing to document the rest of the game, ensuring I don’t miss the next big play.
To accomplish this, I employed carefully-built Adobe Premiere Pro templates and quick editing to produce high quality content while also continuing to shoot the game.
Pitch. Edit. Pitch. Edit. Pitch. Edit. Pitch. Export. Caption. Post. Polished content pushed out to social feeds, all without missing a pitch.
Back in Clearwater, the Wave’s Championship run was punctuated by a walk-off home run by Jackson Linn, his second home run of the game and Tulane’s 5th of the game (each homer earning a feed post published during the game). Linn’s knockout punch to seal the 11-10 victory over Wichita State was understandably the bell of the ball, generating 53.6k views on Instagram.
The skills I honed with Tulane Baseball during the 2024 season opened the door to a role with Tulane Football, where I applied the same creative strategy to Tulane Football’s 2024 Uniform Reveals - you can read more about it here.
*For clarity’s sake, I’m excluding 2 posts made during the 2024 AAC Tournament for which I wasn’t responsible.
