First time in South Carolina

I spent the last half of last week in Columbia, South Carolina for the 2009 North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) Conference. It is the premier sport management conference in North America and most sport management professors and doctoral students make the effort to attend it every year. This was my second year at NASSM (the first one I attended was in Fort Lauderdale, FL in 2007) and I had a great time! I gave two presentations. The first one was part of my dissertation research and the second was a poster presentation with my good friend Erin McNary on using technology in the classroom.

Aside from the conference I also got to experience some Columbia nightlife with fellow conference-goers and spent one day walking around the University of South Carolina campus. It was very beautiful and I'll include some photos below. I am finding that the more and more I attend these conferences the more and more fun they become! Every time I go to one I meet more colleagues from other universities and it's nice to see more familiar faces with each conference! :)

Here are some South Carolina photos:

Erin and me at a Columbia Blowfish minor league baseball game.

I found the Kappa Delta house on the USC campus! :)

Part of the "horseshoe" area of the University of South Carolina campus.

A beautiful building on campus.

They love the palmetto tree!

Erin and me with our poster presentation on using technology in the sport management classroom. We got a lot of great feedback on it!

Erin and me at the big conference dinner. There were nearly 600 attendees.

Erin and me with some colleagues that we met at the SMAANZ Conference in New Zealand a few years ago. Kevin, a professor at UMass, Adam, a Ph.D. student at Deakin University in Australia, and Heath, a professor at Deakin.

In other news, we have just 12 days until we close on our house in Bloomington, which is exciting, but our real estate agent is proving to be pretty incompetent. I'm ready to get pretty upset if she doesn't shape up soon. I could do a better job of this myself than she is doing, and she has eight years of experience. I can't stand people who don't follow-through on things...and she might be the worst person at follow through that I've ever met in my life.

That's all for now!