Hundreds of athletes. Several sports. Five teams. 1 Trojan Cup.
The Trojan cup is a campus-wide competition where five managers recruited teams to compete in several sports and challenges over the course of a month. The team with the best marketing of their brand and best performances in the sports events won a cash prize of 500 dollars.
The creator, junior Lextin Willis, said the beginnings of Trojan Cup came after his supervisor and mentor Victor Cusato encouraged him to be a part of a creativity stretch. As an Ignite intern and worker at the Center For Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Willis was encouraged by Cusato to create a vision for something on campus, and he would help him put it into action.
With the freedom he was given, Willis combined his two interests of sports management and entrepreneurship to create the framework of the first version of The Trojan Cup during the fall of 2023.
“It’s kind of funny I still have the notebook I was working in, where I would just write down ideas,” Willis said. “I just look back and see how different it was to start.”
After several delays, Willis was finally able to release the plans for Trojan Cup, which began in April. After gaining backing from Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Economics, doctor Mick Bates, CIE manager Kyra Zylestra, and Amy Stucky, Department Chair of the Sports Management department, marketing to the student body and gaining support from other clubs on campus, his hundreds of hours of work began to gain traction.
Additionally, campus involvement has been a major element to the traction of the tournament. Willis created challenges to include a well rounded assortment of sports. This included a skill day, which included dodgeball, cornhole and spikeball, a speed day, which incorporated swimming, biking, and a 4x100m relay, and a strength day, which included tug-of-war, med ball toss and bench press, to attract a wider base of athletes for recruitment.
“I want more people than just the people who play intramurals to be able to get involved, but also to be able to contribute,” Willis said. “That influenced the all-team challenges with the speed, skill and strength base because I wanted maximum involvement.”
As one of the only sports management events on campus, Willis said it is designed to give real world experience in the areas of sports management and business, and to teach skills in a fun and engaging way.
Throughout April, the Trojan Cup fostered a friendly competition between five teams: the TU Cowboys, Waikiki Warriors, TU Tornados, Silent Knights and Trojan Elites.
Freshman Aiden Orth is a part of the management team for the TU Tornados as their Communications Director. He said that the Tournament has been an avenue to different aspects of management.
“Doing the Trojan Cup, the branding and marketing side, is kind of something I would like to do,” he said. “I am in charge of our team’s, The TU Tornados, Instagram page. So I make the Game Day graphics, final score graphics and try to promote our team and grow it.”
Orth said that it was a unique opportunity to get to build a team from scratch and build specific things that they were trying to look for. As a Sports Management major, he said that it has been interesting to be a part of.
Highlights of the Tornados’s performances have included their 4x100m relay on Speed Day where they won with a time of 48.38 seconds. With a couple of wins on the basketball court, middle of the pack scores on strength day, the TU Tornados sit at fifth place in the Week 4 standings with 9,000 points.
Junior Ryan Killinger, General Manager for the TU Cowboys team, said that it is a great opportunity for using business skills that he has learned while at Taylor. With the opportunity to grow in marketing, he said that he has tried to have their team marketed in many different ways.
“I want as many different aspects of marketing as possible,” he said. “That’s why we have gotten with the $750 dollars we have gotten from sponsors, I have gotten two different jerseys and arm sleeves.”
He also talked about the role of media presence through platforms such as Instagram, photography and paper advertisements set up around the student center.
The Cowboys, despite having a rough go of it on strength day placing fourth and fifth, had solid, second place performances in all of the events on the speed day. With a couple volleyball, basketball, and soccer wins, the Cowboys wrapped up their results after Week 4 sitting in third with 38,000 points.
As Willis continues to refine the current version of Trojan Cup, he said to watch for sign ups around campus next year, where the staff will be looking for more managers and more athletes.
Described on Instagram as a “month-long sports management competition,” the Cup teams were judged based on branding and marketing, along with athletic performance in various sports and challenges for a cash prize.
The final showdown of the Cup was a lively team dodgeball competition on Thursday, May 1.
While events including volleyball, soccer, basketball, dodgeball and pickleball made up for the athletic side of the competition, each team’s marketing also accounted for 40 percent of total points.
Zach McKinney, manager of the Trojan Elites, spent two weeks recruiting athletes and marketers.
“I have some close friends — one is a marketer, and the other is an athlete — so they helped me put the team together,” he said.
After recruiting his team, he coordinated throughout the competition with the other team managers, as well as figured out which athletes participated in which events. With 23,000 points, the Trojan Elites ended in fourth, just behind the TU Tornados. With tough competition on the athletic side, McKinney leaned into marketing efforts.
“We knew there were going to be some really hard teams out there,” he said. “So we really emphasize the marketing aspect of the competition. We make sure to post daily on our Instagram so we can be sure we don’t lose points in that aspect.”
Their account garnered 174 followers, with 36 total posts.
The Silent Knights, managed by Austin Snively, saw successful results as they led the competition with 70,000 points, ahead of second-place Waikiki Warriors by over 30,000 points. Snively is not only his team’s manager, but he also participated in basketball, where they won all three games with scores of 124-82, 99-72, and 89-84.
“I really enjoy playing, but I love seeing how much fun everyone’s having,” Snively said. “As long as the team is having fun, I’m happy.”
Snively also talked about some of the challenges he faced when making the team, including finding sponsors, deciding their team’s name, creating a team Instagram and getting everybody on the team.
Although many details came into play before the actual competition began, Snively was still eager for the festivities.
“I saw the Trojan Cup and it just sounded fun,” he said. “I love intramurals, I love sports, and I’m friends with a lot of athletes who I knew would want to do it.”
McKinney, Snively and Waikiki Warriors manager Gusto Sanabria had common strategies in building their teams.
Sanabria walked through his recruiting process; just as McKinney and Snively did, he started with his friends then just continued to make connections.
“The first thing I did was talk to some of the guys on my wing who I know are athletic,” he said. “I talked to them, then they talked to some of their friends, and that’s basically how we made the team.”
Sanabria said that his favorite part throughout this month was to watch his team compete. Though he did not participate, he enjoyed watching them succeed in their different events.
One notable experience for Sanabria was the tug-of-war, in which the Warriors placed second.
“Seeing how the team competed was really exciting,” he said. “They gave everything; it was really fun to watch.”
The Waikiki Warriors ended with 39,000 points.
The Trojan Cup concluded with a closing banquet on Saturday, May 3, revealing the Silent Knights as the first-ever Trojan Cup champions, along with several other awards: the Silent Knights won the award for best marketing, Kyle Cosart and Liv Dougherty were named MVPs, and best team manager was given to Aiden Orth and Quentauris Jones.
