On October 24, sport management doctoral candidate Mike Mudrick was a recipient of the Best Paper Award at the annual conference of the Sport Marketing Association in Philadelphia, PA. The paper, co-authored by Drs. Brendan Dwyer, Greg Greenhalgh, and Carrie LeCrom of Virginia Commonwealth University, and Dr. Joris Drayer of Temple University, was titled “The tie that blinds: Developing a scale to measure emotional attachment to sport team”.

Though the emotional bond between a fan and his/her favorite team is one of the most distinct attributes that separates spectator sport from other products and services, this study was the first of such nature to create and validate a specific instrument of emotional attachment. Two distinct factors of emotional attachment were found: investment, which represented cognitive feelings put into the team, and dividend, which exemplified affective feelings derived from the team. Furthermore, a construct validity test found that individuals with higher investment scores placed a higher, yet quite irrational value on team success in comparison to those with higher dividend scores.