Stuart Elliott

Athletes, if they are talented, train hard and get a break or two, can climb the sports ladder from high school to college to the pros. Madison Avenue, sensing a lucrative opportunity, is heading the other way. High school cheerleaders got free bottles of Propel Fitness Water.

Decades after marketers began selling products by capitalisingon consumer interest in professional teams, then college teams, they are becoming big boosters of high school sports.

Big media companies are getting into the market as well, in part by offering high school competitors a taste of the exposure that is typically lavished on college and pro athletes. In March, the CSTV Networks division of the CBS Corporation?the ?CS? stands for college sports?acquired MaxPreps, which operates a website (maxpreps.com) and has more than a million high school athletes in its database. Last month, CSTV began creating video-on-demand television channels under the MaxPreps brand carrying high school sports programming.

Another media giant, the Time Inc division of Time Warner, formed an alliance in December with Takkle, which operates a social-networking website for high school athletes (takkle.com). Visitors to the site can nominate students for the familiar ?Face in the Crowd? feature in Sports Illustrated magazine. ?High school kids are more sophisticated than a generation ago,? said Mark Ford, president and publisher of Sports Illustrated in New York, ?and brands such as Nike and Gatorade are on this, reaching athletes at a much earlier stage than they previously have.?

The goal is to gain favour with student athletes and also their coaches, teachers and principals?not to mention their fans, friends and families. ?Energy for student athletes, and the moms who keep up with them? is, for instance, the theme of advertisements for EAS AdvantEDGE nutritional bars and shakes, sold by Abbott Laboratories.

High school athletes buy all the obvious products, sneakers, gear, sports beverages, along with general items such as grooming aids, magazines and video games. Many high schoolers shop for the family while their parents work, so they may be buying groceries along with items for themselves.

Students can also influence the purchasing choices of their parents in important categories such as cars, cellphones and computers. For example, in 2005, Allstate Insurance started coordinating a programme for local agents ?to demonstrate their support of high school athletes,? said Lisa Cochrane, vice-president for integrated marketing communications at Allstate in Northbrook, llinois. The brand is present in more than 700 high schools where agents sponsor teams and make donations to athletic departments.

?In many, many communities, high school athletics is one of the premier events,? Cochrane said, adding, ?Teenagers themselves are not big customers for insurance, but their parents are. And they will be, in the future.?

The trend is also visible in the popular culture, as two TV series?Friday Night Lights on NBC and One Tree Hill on CW?are centred on high school teams that play football and basketball, respectively. Both have attracted sponsors willing to pay to weave their brands into plot lines; among them are Applebee?s restaurants, Cingular Wireless and Secret deodorant. ?We?ve spent more than 30 years building our relationships with customers,? said Jeff Webb, chief executive at Varsity Brands in Memphis, which specialises in goods and services for high school cheerleading and dance teams. ?In the last 10 years, our programmes with consumer marketers have expanded dramatically.?

Companies such as Bic, SC Johnson & Son, Nike, PepsiCo and Playtex Products work with Varsity Brands, which sends 300 field representatives to high schools across the country to give away product samples and coupons and operates cheerleader camps that draw about 2,80,000 high school students each year.