Sponsored by Off the Block and Springbak, Inc., the 2014 NCAA Fan Choice Player of the Year Award was chosen by men's volleyball fans across the country. I quickly recognized this "tournament" as an opportunity for a social media campaign to aid both athletes in gaining votes and advance as far as the fans would take them.
The voting process followed the pattern of an NCAA basketball tournament. There were 64 nominees, each placed into four regions and given a seed, one through sixteen. BYU's Taylor Sander, already named National Player of the Year by the AVCA (and he would soon be named Player of the Year by Volleyball Magazine), was the top seed in his "region" of the bracket, and teammate Michael Hatch was a 13-seed. Once the competition reached the "Final Four" it was no longer in a bracket format, and the semifinalists Sander and Hatch were now in a competition against each other and two other athletes.
In reality, Taylor Sander was the more deserving of the two Cougar players, but it didn't seem right to completely ignore Michael Hatch at this stage of my social media campaign. In spite of my concerns that the two would split the BYU vote and neither would win I elected to promote both players, at least initially.
It seemed BYU fans had chosen to focus their voting efforts on Taylor Sander when a release issued by Off the Block heading into the final day of voting stated that Taylor Sander and the two finalists from other schools were all within 100 votes of each other. It was now clear that Michael Hatch had fallen out of the race and I felt it was acceptable to focus BYU's efforts solely on Sander.
Taylor "Sandman" Sander had to withstand every school's best effort and survived some close calls. He also had to overcome a slightly split vote from the BYU fan base in the final round, but leveraging the power of social media I was able to help Sander complete a sweep of the National Player of the Year awards, ending with the Fan Choice Player of the Year.
The following are the Facebook posts from that campaign.
