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Michael Hill
4-18-2012
6th A.P. Lit./Comp.
Tillery
Senior Project Speech
Imagine yourself in a home without the basics. No electricity. No heat in the
wintertime. Perhaps even no running water. Imagine no home at all. Thousands of people
in Georgia alone have to deal with conditions like this or worse on a daily basis. My
name is Michael Hill and for my senior project I ultimately choose to put on a 3 on 3
basketball tournament with all proceeds going to Creekview’s Habitat for Humanity
Club. I choose this because it was a project that I could explore my interest in business
while staying comfortable with my interest in basketball, and help out a great cause.
The process for the creation of my product began with my research paper. After
all, I had never put on a fundraiser of my own, so I needed to find out everything I could
about how to run one. While some students just do their research paper because they
have to include it in their project, mine was absolutely necessary. My research paper
basically led me to how I was going to set up my fundraiser. I implemented many things
that I learned in my research paper into my actual project. Things like my advertising,
communication, and how the actual tournament was run all came from my research
paper. One specific example is what I learned in my research paper on advertising. At
first, I planned on using a rather generic advertising scheme. However, my research paper
made me reconsider this. I learned specifically about how different texts, color schemes,
and images could attract different audiences. With all this in mind I redesigned my

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advertisements (show visual aid of advertisement). I wanted to make an advertisement
that would draw my audience of teenage athletes and I feel I succeeded greatly in this.
Although my advertisements were ready, I still had things to do before I started
putting them up. One challenge I had was to secure a location for the tournament. After
days of researching different venues I finally settled on a local church with a very nice
indoor gym. Another difficulty was to set up an easy way for people to learn more about
my project after they saw the initial advertisement. My solution to this was to create a
page for a Facebook group titled Creekview 3 on 3 so it would be easy for people to find.
The page provided more detail about the project like the time, date, and location. In
addition to all this, I provided a link to Habitat for Humanity in order to inform people
about where the money raised would go. The Facebook group was also supposed to be
how I was going to communicate with the participants. Unfortunately, this turned out to
be quite a dilemma, arguably the most difficult problem throughout my project.
Thankfully, I was able to solve this problem later on. After the Facebook group was
established I began to place my advertisements. Obviously, I wanted them to get a lot of
attention so I looked carefully over all the places I could put them. Finally, I settled on
placing them throughout the school at various water fountains. This seemed like the best
idea as this was the place that students were most likely to stop and look at a distraction.
Around this time I also began airing my commercial on the school’s news channel.
Word began to spread quickly around school, and soon I was inundated with
inquiries about the tournament. Fortunately, I was well prepared and was able to get a lot
of people interested. Once I had a gauge of how many people were going to be there I
began to plan for the actual day of the event. While this may sound easy, it was actually

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quite time consuming. I created a timeline to let me get a generalization of how long the
games were going to take place. I also had to decide on things like seeding and the
bracket setup. Would certain teams get byes? How would those byes be determined?
Should it be a round robin tournament or a round by round elimination tournament? To
solve these problems, I combined my opinions with opinions that I had collected from
participators in the event. In the end, I decided on a beginning round robin tournament to
seed the teams. The two teams with the best records would get first round byes in the
double elimination tournament. With most of my problems resolved, there was only one
issue left to tackle: the communication. Although I thought the Facebook group would
be a great way to communicate it proved to actually be quite a hindrance. Not everyone
checked the page making it very difficult to attain the things I needed from the
participants, like the participants money and their insurance information. Additionally I
was not able to see everyone in school in order to tell them in person about the things I
needed. This made for a huge mess. Just two days before the tournament only three
people had turned in the necessary items. I was officially freaking out. So I took it upon
myself to inform all of them individually. Through perseverance and some legally
questionable actions I was able to get contact information for everyone in the tournament.
The night before the tournament I got in touch with each participant telling them
everything they needed to bring in order to partake in the event. With the final bullet
dodged, all I had to do was set everything up before the tournament. The tournament
itself was probably the easiest part of my whole project. Everyone brought everything
they needed to and, as you can see in my video, it all went according to plan.

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In conclusion, my senior project helped me learn a lot of things about myself. I
previously thought that I was rigid in planning and had to have everything go exactly as I
planned. However due to all the problems I learned that I was actually quite good at
adapting to the situation at hand. This project was supposed to help me explore my
interest in business, and it definitely achieved that. I will be attending either Georgia
College and State University or Georgia State University with plans to major in business
and specialize in marketing. Even though it was not quite like a business my projects
business aspects definitely fostered my interest in business.