Without a doubt, Scrimmage Play wins Journey's "Quickest Approval on a Proposal Ever" award — a mere 15 minutes. That kind of confidence and trust has shaped our collaboration with Scrimmage Play since the beginning and has led to our mutual success.
The founding partners of Scrimmage Play first approached Journey in May 2009 with a name and a budding idea: to step into the high-school sports arena, just as newspapers seem to be pulling out, and create a local sports magazine and website to celebrate the athletes of Central Virginia. By blending traditional journalism standards with innovative media and technology, Scrimmage Play sought to push the envelope.
"We had the vision, but we needed the articulation of that vision," says Bart Isley, who founded Scrimmage Play with his father, Bob. "We wanted to find a creative firm that would own the vision as much as we do."
With only three months until the kickoff for fall sports, Scrimmage Play needed to move fast to publish its first print magazine and launch its website — and the company needed a creative partner who could not only move quickly at the start but also keep pace into the future. "We're constantly evolving," Bart explains, "reconceptualizing how to handle high-school sports coverage."
Together, we strategized and conceived every expression of Scrimmage Play — from the brand to the monthly print magazine to the website. Believing that the website should not be a mere reflection of the magazine or vice versa, we decided on a model where both pieces would complement one another and establish Scrimmage Play as the "community touchstone" for high-school sports.
We envisioned a print magazine that would serve as the Sports Illustrated for Central Virginia high schools, featuring in-depth reporting, well-written player profiles and incredible photography.
As we saw it, scrimmageplay.com would become the "daily watering hole" — the source for all sports schedules, up-to-the-minute scores and real-time game coverage. This online news portal would integrate video, podcasts and a custom Flash-based photo-gallery module for an immersive experience, as well as Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds.
"We thought we would be a magazine company with a rock-solid website," Bart says. "But Journey has shaped us into a web company with a terrific print product."
The joy for us, as with many of our clients, was partnering with people who truly love what they do. Bart and Bob brought their inventiveness and enthusiasm, and they trusted us to flex our creative muscle. "Journey helped us refine and clarify a sweeping vision into a tight, focused project," Bart says, "and also drive the vision to take it into new places."
Scrimmage Play became a playground of ideas for Journey, both in creating the initial print and web components and as we've carried the brand further and developed new revenue streams. We crafted a strategy to sell individual photography prints on SmugMug and most recently launched the Playmakers Club — an exclusive subscription service that donates a portion of proceeds to the athletic department of the subscriber's choice.
"We never thought that's what we'd need," Bart says, "but people started handing me checks for subscriptions at games, so we came to Journey and said, 'We want to make it bigger and we want to do it right.' Journey helped us discover the easiest way to do that. They innovate on our problems."
It's this mutual trust that has empowered us to drive great ideas to even greater places — to take risks and see them succeed. "By 'letting go' with Journey a lot of times," Bart says, "it ended up being in our favor.
"What's great for us," he adds, "is when you go to a game wearing some type of Scrimmage Play logo and someone says, 'Aw, man, I love that magazine.' Or a young kid asks, 'Do you have the latest copy of Scrimmage Play?'
"We've connected with the community, and the community believes in what we do. That's what's going to make us successful."
And it's what makes this partnership so fun.