8/15 Last Day for Internship #1

Today is a bittersweet day. As I read over some of these post, I remember all of the great memories and lists full of information I have learned during these short 16 weeks of summer school. I am glad to have completed another course, however it is bittersweet to be leaving the studio for a week. I only had one hour left out of my 120, and I am spending it writing this post and planning for Internship #2 with FFDS (Fall 2011 semester... Aug 22nd through December). I have enjoyed learning more about what goes on "behind the scenes" of a sports industry business and I look forward to having more communication with suppliers, families, new students and the FFDS staff.

8/13 Open House

MONKEY JOE AND MRS.PAULA. Monkey Joe was a HUGE hit. He came and danced with all of our students to show his support for our studio. Also, he gave out coupons for our students and their families to use so they can go and exercise at his home full of jump and bounce houses. We had SEVERAL of our community companions show up and support our event and we had around 75 new students joing the FFDS family- I would say it was a HUGE success! I helped with registration, studio tours and event scheduling.

8/12 Open House Set-Up

Today was a long and tiring day that will hopefully be well worth it! Several students and their family members assisted the staff in cleaning and organizing the studio for tomorrow's Open House event. Also, I was able to assist the administrative director with setting up for the event and making sure our social network tools were broadcasting news about our event. I think I broke a "dancers sweat" today :). Tune in tomorrow for pictures from the Open House!

8/8- 8/11 Open House Marketing

SUCCESS! This week I was able to reconnect with our community companions and get each establishment to agree to donate something for our Open House. Several pizza places aggreed to donate pizzas, as well as sandwiches from several sub shops. My favorite agreement- Monkey Joes agreed to send Joe down in costume to dance with our students and our director! Open House is going to be amazing, and I was very pleased to be able to save the studio a lot of money by getting food and entertainment for free!

8/6 Tax Free Weekend

FFDS is located in the Windsor Square Shopping center in Matthews, along with Kohls. Kohls allowed FFDS to be a part of their huge tax free weekend sale, so I spent my saturday at Kohls handing out advertisements about our studio and answering questions from prospective members. A smile lite up my face three different times when current students ran up to me saying, "HEY Miss Brittany", and it finally sunk in that I am officially part of the FFDS family. Kohls is also one of our community companions and Kohls is located directly infront of our establishment. Kohls ended up being a great location for marketing, and hopefully we will see several Kohls shoppers at our Open House event next weekend!

8/1-8/4 Learning the Language Part 2

FFDS is proud to announce the hiring of a new gymnastics instructor, Sam. Sam has been teaching in the area for several years now and gladly accepted the invitation to join the FFDS family. It is a FFDS goal to enhance our gymnastics and hip hop program this year, and Sam is going to help us do so. In order for me to sell his services, I set in on some of his technique classes and spoke with the gymnastics students to see how they thought he did. All of the students felt challanged and enjoyed his methods of teaching. Sam seems to love our students and we are surely glad to have him on the staff. At the end of the week, I created and distributed information to all of the current FFDS members about the new addition and invited them to meet Sam at our upcoming Open House. I am already excited for internship part 2 which will start at the same time FFDS starts their Fall 2011 season, August 20th. [Photo of Sam to come].

7/25-7/28 Community Companions

I really enjoyed this week- going to meet the managers of the community establishments that are interested in being our Community Companions. A community companion is a company in Matthews that agrees to post our FFDS advertisements and in return we post theirs. Also, we offer a our services at a discount for them, and hope that they will do the same for us if we need. I was able to establish a relationship with several places in our own shopping center, such as Monkey joes and Cici's Pizza.