Guest Post: A Summer of Hoops Learning in Japan…

Today’s guest post is by John Owen, one of our sports management students who recently spent time travelling…and learning with the Columbia Women’s Basketball team on their summer trip to Japan. I asked John to provide his thoughts after watching the great Apple TV documentary on the UConn wmen’s team, and how one of their key moments was a trip to Italy during the Sue Bird era. While I don;t think this trip was as pivotal as that one…time will tell…the experience of summer trips like this are invaluable, even for those along for the ride.

Take it away John.

Sports has taken me to places I could never have imagined. My first sports memory is of watching the legendary 2008 Wimbledon Final between Federer and Nadal in a living room crowded with my brothers, parents and extended family. I did not know at the time that we had a long tradition of watching the Grand Slam’s together as a family, nor that that particular final would go down in history as one of the greatest of all time, but I did sense sports had a special way of bringing people together. I have three brothers, all very competitive, and sports was one of the main ways we connected as we grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. From a young age, I knew I wanted to take that connection and make it a career, but nothing could have prepared me for the doors it has opened.

Recently, I had the pleasure of traveling to Japan with the Columbia Women’s Basketball program as a team manager. Over the course of the trip we moved through Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Tokyo, playing two local universities and finally their national team in Tokyo. The trip was a once in a lifetime experience and not only opened my eyes to a completely different culture, but also taught me about the business of global sports. I want to highlight three of those lessons in this blog: (1). Brand-building; the importance of investing in content as a mid-major program (2). Basketball as a universal language: some things don’t need translation (3) Hiroshima & cultural-agility: adapting to unfamiliarity.

Brand-building: The importance of investing in content as a mid-major program:

One of the biggest takeaways from this trip was the importance of on-site content capture and up-to-date posting on social media platforms. Winning in sports is all about finding a competitive advantage, an edge so to speak on your opponent. The great teams are able to continually find advantages and exploit them, similar to how great businesses continually find new revenue sources. Working on the operations side of a team is where sporting and business concepts converge, meaning the line between a business and team advantage blurs. Visibility of a brand is one of those advantages.

During our trip to Japan, the team invested in bringing members of our creative team, as well as members of Columbia Athletic’s Communication Department, both for content capture purposes, but also for guidance to our players on how and what to post. This seems like a no-brainer, especially given that athletic departments across the country are rapidly expanding their creative capabilities (FrontOfficeSports.com). However, the Ivy League’s mid-major status and its old-school mentality, exemplified by its defiance to expand NIL beyond third-party deals (IvyLeague.com), mean its athletic departments are not able to compete with SEC, or BIG12 media budgets. As a result, the expertise our creative team’s brought was valuable on its own, but combined with the actual content opportunities on the trip, it gave us a real advantage.

Somewhere between the three games, this stopped feeling like a standard scouting trip and started feeling like a brand moment. Playing a country’s senior national team, inside their own training center, isn’t something most college programs, let alone Ivy League ones, get to say they’ve done. Examples of shareable brand assets during the trip include: daily professional level reels of practices and field trips, player and staff interviews, player story takeovers, and photos through game days and trip days.

This kind of trip is a huge opportunity for a program to take a step forward on the basketball court but also for their brand. The material a team can capture does a lot of work for a program in building recruiting pitches, alumni newsletters and social feeds. What this trip taught me is that visibility is an investment and an advantage teams must make a deliberate effort to capture.

Basketball as a universal language: some things don’t need translation:

Before we played each of our three games in Japan, we exchanged gifts with the opponent. This formality became representative of the shared passion for basketball on both sides. There is no universal language, but sports comes pretty close to it. Each sport has its own vocabulary and basketball is no-different: a screen, a box-out, a hand-up on defense. Everyone in that gym spoke the same language, whether they knew it or not. I have always thought of basketball as a conversation, one team speaks and the other responds, only the conversation comes from play-style and match-ups rather than verbal rhetoric. In this case, both teams found common ground in their fast pace. Basketball in Japan is built largely around guard play, with teams looking to score in fastbreak or behind the three point line as often as possible. Columbia’s style also pushes the tempo, but is also focused on defensive pressure and positional flexibility (meaning it heavily rotates players and utilizes athletes who can switch between positions).

It may come as a surprise that passion for basketball is big in Japan, but the sports history goes back further than most people assume. According to research by Professor Tetsuji Kakiyama, the sport arrived in Japan as early as 1902, brought over not through the men’s game but by American women missionaries teaching at girls’ schools in Nagasaki and Tokyo, years before the more commonly cited 1908 introduction to men’s teams through the YMCA. Women’s basketball is a huge part of how basketball got to Japan in the first place. The more recent chapter of that story is easier to recognize: NBA broadcasts, preseason games in Japan, and homegrown players like Yuki Kawamura and Rui Hachimura reaching the NBA have fueled a real basketball boom there over the last decade, which is part of why the country can now field a national team good enough to fill a training center in Tokyo.

After the matches, despite the intensity of the competition, the players would mingle at half-court and share laughs and exchange stories as best they could. The shared comradery of the sport seemed to outweigh the need to dominate the opponent (at least after the game). Standing in that gym, more than a century after the game had been brought to Japan, it was clear that basketball still has the ability to bring people together.

Hiroshima & cultural-agility: adapting to unfamiliarity

Our visit to Hiroshima reframed the whole trip for me. There are few places that hold the same weight as the Peace Memorial at Hiroshima. Seeing the weight of consequence from the nuclear blast brought a feeling inside my chest, especially as an American visitor, that was incredibly palpable. The only other place I have experienced that feeling was during my visit to Dachau concentration camp in the summer of 2024, which inspired me to write my senior thesis on Holocaust representation within physical rhetoric.

After visiting Hiroshima, I had a better understanding of the country, but what also felt like a better perspective on cultural agility. The memorial forced me to experience something that was very uncomfortable, but that’s what cultural agility requires. To experience another culture means being able to withstand the anxiety or stress that comes with uncertainty. At Hiroshima, I had to confront something that was very uncomfortable, which made the smaller things about the trip easier in comparison. The language barrier, unfamiliar food, the logistics of moving a team through three cities in a foreign country, forces one to adapt to constant unfamiliarity. After the memorial, that unfamiliarity felt easier, but also more important, as an American connecting with a country that we once fought against.

In conclusion, my key takeaways from the trip were that brand-building is worth the investment, basketball travels without needing a translator, and discomfort can be the most useful part of a trip. As mentioned in the introduction to this blog, Sports has taken me to places that I could never have imagined when I was sitting in our living room watching that 2008 final. Japan is just one example of the endless positive possibilities that can come from following one’s dreams.