By Emily Delgado  

Students in the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication learned what it takes to build a sports business through a partnership with the Iowa Heartlanders, a professional minor league hockey team based in Coralville. 

This is the second time the class — Business of Sport Communication — taught by lecturer Charles Munro partnered with the team. Students got an inside look into what it takes to create a sports league team and met with Iowa Heartlanders staff. 

“The students had to figure out setting it up, how you staff it, where the money goes, how you finance it, how you sell rights to it. We spent, as a class, a great deal of time on discussing what it takes to build a sports business,” Munro said.  

Munro comes to the University of Iowa after a successful journalism career spanning three decades as a journalist, manager, industry consultant, and educator. He’s worked in newsrooms across the country and won two Emmy awards for news coverage. 

Business of Sports Communication has been offered for five years. At its core, it's an experiential learning class that allows students to experience the world of sports media, business and communication. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is home to various courses that expose students to this kind of learning outside of the classroom. 

Third-year journalism student Colin Votzmeyer said the class had a great environment that prioritized absorbing the material rather than chasing a grade, something Votzmeyer was grateful for.  

“There's a lot of leeway for what you're learning, what you want to pursue, how you want to tackle certain projects,” Votzmeyer said. “Professor Munro would just say, this is what I expect from you and now run with it. You're just experimenting with sports business. It was a mesh of different kinds of experiences.” 

At the beginning of the course, students were able to go into Xtream Arena and meet with the business and communications team for the Iowa Heartlanders. The staff was very open to talking with students.  

“They were all very receptive to us. Reaching out if we needed help with anything, which was very appreciated coming from people who are professionals in the industry,” Votzmeyer said.  

At the end of the semester, students came up with business pitches for the Heartlanders team.  

“On the very last day of the semester, two Heartlanders people came in, and each team made their presentation, and they did great,” Munro said. 

It was a proud moment for Munro.  

“They had some really great ideas,” he said. “Some ideas surrounded transportation to and from the arena and how they could put together a night for students.”  

The idea for this class came from the want and need of students to learn about the other side of communications — like the business side — while still tying in the value of journalism and mass communication to the sporting world and our culture across the world more broadly.  

“In the journalism school you can be in classes that really hone in on techniques of writing and producing and chasing a story, but it's good to balance that out with a class where we're able to come in, sit down, and be sponges for what the sports landscape is like,” Votzmeyer added.