A Slam Dunk of an Award For Bennett Awards and Red Bull
Bennett Awards is ecstatic to have gotten to contribute to the excitement of the 2024 Red Bull Half Court World Finals by creating an incredible sculpture award to help honor the accomplishments of the amazing athletes who came out on top in the competition. Thanks to the collaborative and creative skills of the Bennett team, this custom award managed to honor the spirit of the unique sport that is half court basketball, and the spirit of the Brooklyn location where the finals tournament was held this year.
The Bennett Award project managers worked closely and thoughtfully with the Red Bull tournament’s design team and were able to find design solutions that met a myriad of specific needs and desires for the award. One of the most unique challenges involved a request that the award be presentable as a single award, but also capable of coming apart into four individual awards for each winning team member to receive. This makes practical sense, as the combined award would be a larger, impressive size for ceremonial and marketing purposes while the divided single sections would still enable each winner to receive something distinguished and beautiful to individually bring home. But this remarkable design feature also contributes to capturing the spirit of the sport itself, symbolizing each player’s individual skills and efforts coming together for the team to succeed.
This interactive design also required some specialized solutions when it came to assembly. Our designers created a unique intermediate base that would bring all the elements together, literally and figuratively, when the award was presented as a combined whole, but felt that it was safest to ship this base separately. This meant that Red Bull’s team would have to receive and assemble the awards before they were presented, not to mention take the award apart when the individual pieces were distributed to the champions. Luckily Bennett’s assembly and shipping department found ways to make this process streamlined and manageable, and even filmed a “how-to” assembly video to make sure the communication was as clear as possible.
Another fun design challenge for the Bennett team was devising a way to celebrate the tournament’s return to U.S. soil after being held internationally for a number of years. Red Bull (a U.S.-based company) wanted to celebrate and highlight the iconic Brooklyn Bridge Park location of the finals this year, which is an element that is particularly significant because the origins of half-court basketball as a sport trace back to this very spot in the world. Now a formal Olympic sport played all over the world as a legitimate form of traditional basketball, half-court basketball began as street basketball in playgrounds and lots in New York City, where street art and graffiti were also revolutionized. This urban sport and unique art form came together when street artists would use the courts as public canvases for their colorful and expressive works. Given this history (which continues today), the design of the award eschews traditional minimalist award expectations and features bold graffiti-style lettering on the base. In addition, the award is copper-plated so that a patina finish can develop over time and create a less-refined and more timeworn feel that mirrors the inner-city spaces where the sport is still played and honed today. Finally, the design features a cutout of an apple shape in the “core” of the award which is revealed when the four individual pieces come apart.
Our project manager, Karen McCrea, shared that one of the most memorable parts of the award creation process was the day the award arrived back from the production facility and the Bennett team got to experience the physical culmination of these intricate ideas, including the reveal of the apple on the inside: “Everyone was super impressed,” Karen recalled, “which is a great feeling.” We are confident the recipients were impressed too, including the winning men’s team from Serbia and the women’s team from Japan, beating out over 6,500 other players from around the globe. Additionally, Bennett created smaller awards for the Most Valuable Players of the tournament, sponsored by FILA, that still looked cohesive with the Champions’ award, and managed to feature both the tournament’s logo and honor FILA with an eye-catching cutout of the iconic “F”.
Despite the specific requirements and requests we had to navigate with this custom award, the Bennett team made a truly unique and distinguished custom art award that honored half-court basketball, including its history, and honored the accomplishments of the world’s best players of the game. The Bennett team is excited to be a part of Red Bull’s World Finals tournament which will undoubtedly continue to grow this sport and garner it the respect it deserves!