Outside Speaker critique
The Economics of a New Arena in Milwaukee
On Monday April 8th, I attended a conference at the Marquette Law school that focused on the possibility of building a new sports and entertainment center in Milwaukee, WI. The conference was about 5 hours long and had a panel of many different speakers who all spoke and gave their insights on the whether building a new arena was a good idea. Due to lack of time I just stayed for the first hour and heard from Dr. Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor from Smith College, who was the first speaker. Dr. Zimbalist is an expert in sports economics and focuses his studies in the sports world and how teams operate on the business side of things. He was a very good speaker and for my critique I am going to focus on the set up and structure of his speech as well as his mechanics and delivery. The thing that first stood out to me about Dr. Zimbalist’s speech was that it relied on a lot of stats and facts. His opinion did not weigh in much on his speech, which was beneficial, but it would have been nice to see him have a little more passion and emotion about the topic at hand. Also, due to the amount of facts and stats he used he did occasionally have to reference a sheet or notecards. This was not a major issue but there were times when he had to read off a lot of stats where I could feel him disconnect with the audience a bit because of his lack of eye contact. One positive thing Dr. Zimbalist did with the stats and facts he had researched was put them up on a PowerPoint presentation for the audience to see. Although his PowerPoint lacked color or much flair it had all of the data neatly listed in a very compact, readable manner. He also did a good job of referencing the PowerPoint and used it as a way to give his project good structure and direction. I would say that Dr. Zimbalist’s biggest strength was his clarity, and I believe that was due to his presentation structure and organization. He did a great job of relating statistics and facts to the project at hand by laying out his information in a clear, chronological way that made sense. He was concise when talking about things and made sure not to ramble on too much about certain economic aspects that some people would not understand. The way he went about getting his information and data across was definitely a strength to his presentation. One thing I would critique Dr. Zimbalist on was how he used