Teacher looks to turn prize winner into a business

Eighteen years ago, Trina Woelfle was a three-sport athlete tennis, basketball and track at Carson High School.

She was most successful at track, but her chances of winning a college scholarship were borderline.

With no one to help her win the exposure she needed,Woelfle considers herself lucky that the University of Nevada, Reno, offered her a tuition-only scholarship that allowed her to study physical education and English.

In seven years as a physical education teacher at Wooster High School,Woelfle, 35, has seen her own situation replayed over and over again as middling athletes, not elite players or superstars, don't know how to find athletic scholarships.

Her frustration led to an idea professional preparation of videos to be submitted to college coaches that won a national contest for women entrepreneurs organized by ABC News' Good Morning America and Boston,Mass.-based Accion USA.About 2,000 women submitted entries.

The prize-winning idea, in turn, will take flight as a business this spring.

Accion awarded Woelfle a $5,000 grant, which allowed her to buy a Mac, a DVD burner and a printer for the business she's named Next Play Productions.

(The company's Web site is www.nextplaydreams.com.) She's invested about $10,000 in the business so far.

She started working on the idea early last year, conducting market research with coaches at UNR and other schools.

"I asked them what do they like to see in the video.

Do they want uninterrupted footage? Do they want only highlights?" she says."And they are all different for different sports, so I think every video I will make is really sport-specific."

Football coaches want both uninterrupted footage as well as skills highlights.

Golf coaches want to see more of the player's swing and putting stroke.

One product developed by Woelfle is a $129 package of DVDs of the athletes in competition to be sent to college coaches.

The students will provide the video themselves, perhaps using material shot by parents or coaches.Woelfle will edit it into a professional looking package.

This package, she says, is competitive with video agencies and on-line services that price similar service at $1,000 or more.

But bigger competition may come from students who know enough about video editing that they can do the work themselves.

Mike Shirley, owner of Reno's Double Diamond Athletic Club and Parisi Speed School franchise, an athletic performance center for student athletes, says competition for athletic scholarships has increased as tuition costs rise.

"A parent probably feels more need to do what they can to promote and present their child to the colleges," he says."Trina's service does it well and affordably."

If the student wants a list of colleges with a particular criterion in mind for example, a West Coast school that offers an engineering program and softball Next Play Productions would provide a list for an additional $89.

If students want Woelfle to do the videography she has hired three videographers the cost would be $799 for the video and list of colleges.And a package called "Glory Days," video highlights of athletes' careers, is priced at $59 per hour.

The judges of the national contest lauded what they called a "realistic business plan" that included financial projections and short and long-term goals.

"She had realistic goals in terms of how many types of video packages she would offer she didn't say she would be everything to everybody," says Erika Eurkus, Accion USA's program director, who was also one of the judges.

Judges also liked Woelfle's ability to ramp up the business on a part-time basis.

"We really liked the fact that she should be able to launch this on her own from a home-based office ... and make it happen herself pretty quickly," Eurkus adds.

Woelfle's marketing efforts include walking the beat talking to the coaches and parents and handing out brochures.

Eurkus says that the neophyte entrepreneur has to be cautious how she manages the volume of work.

Being a single-person operation, Eurkus says, she should guard against taking on too much too quickly.

Woelfle will wait to see how the business goes before deciding whether to leave teaching to work fulltime in the business.

"As of now the ultimate goal if it goes well will be to have a store in the center of the town here in Reno where kids will come in chasing their dreams,"Woelfle says."Now that I'm into it, it's scary, but I'm such a dreamer myself."