A conversation with Jennifer McCraw from Upward Sports hosted by Nate Gilmore and Bailey Friberg

I'm Nate Gilmore, host of the Holiness Today podcast.

Yeah, I'm Bailey Freeberg.

I'm communications and partner coordinator for the USA Canada region.

And we're having a conversation with...

Jennifer McCurl, marketing and partnerships manager, Upward Sports.

Welcome to the Holiness Today podcast, Jennifer, Bailey.

Welcome back.

Hey.

Good to have you

both here.

Yeah.

We are working on UCRO partnerships.

So Bailey introduced me to Jennifer.

And so we're working, sorry, Bailey, I need to tease UCRO out of my name.

I said that to my brother the other day, my own brother.

And he says, what's UCRO? So USA Canada Regional Office, but USA Canada Church of the Nazarene, the region of USA Canada is working on partnerships.

If there's

one thing us Nazarenes are good at is our acronyms.

We know

way too many acronyms, Jennifer.

There's just, I don't even know them all, but I'm just saying.

No, I think we've got you right.

We have you beat, for sure.

Internally here at Upward, we have you beat, for sure.

But Bailey, if you could just kind of connect us.

Well, you grew up playing Upward sports, so I'm going to hand it over to you, but tell us how you got connected with Jennifer, and yeah, I'll let you start us out.

Yeah, well, if you guys haven't met me before, my name's Bailey.

I'm the USA Canada Regional Office Communication Partner Coordinator, which means I get to work with our three main partnerships for the USA Canada region.

And one of those is Upward Sports.

We also have Ministry of Designs and Alpha.

But I think Upward Sports might be our longest partnership with you guys.

And it's something I grew up doing.

It's something my siblings grew up doing.

My husband from a different state grew up doing it.

It's core memories of our childhood.

So I absolutely love that I get to work with Jennifer and the Upward Sports team, just because the impact it's had on my life as an athlete, to also watching all of our churches continue doing this and continue starting it up.

It's super exciting.

So we have a really unique and awesome partnership with Upward Sports with Jennifer, and I'm going to let her introduce herself a little bit more about Upward, and then we'll jump into some questions.