Last week at the National Futures Tournament, there were a number of vendor tents featuring DVDs, sticks, clothing, and even smoothies.

There were also fundraisers for the U.S. field hockey team — T-shirts, rubberized bracelets, and even plush bears, about the size of Beanie Babies, selling for $100.

The latter represents the lowest rung of USA Field Hockey’s fundraising drive called Beijing and Beyond, an effort to cover expenses to send the team to the Olympics.

Normally, this would not be an issue. Time was, the USFHA had a number of big-dollar sponsors such as General Motors, Budweiser, New Balance, and Home Depot. Today’s sponsor list has a lot of suppliers and partners and providers, but there’s no big presenting sponsor.

The budgetary numbers, which you can find on USA Field Hockey’s web site, speak for themselves. In 2002, the corporate sponsorship line item totaled $267,809. In 2005, that number was $39,650 — a drop of some 85 percent.

That’s an awful lot of teddy bears.

Why the disparity? There is a conflict when it comes to how Olympic sponsorships are solicited and packaged, and it goes far beyond which athletes wear what corporate logos on their swim caps or on the leg of a speed-skating suit.

A lot of protections for sponsorships of national governing bodies have eroded as the U.S. Olympic Committee has been centralizing its control over amateur sport in this country. From funding cuts as punishment for failure to qualify for Olympic games, to the mining of medals in individual sports to the detriment of team sports (seen during the disastrous tenure of Norman Blake as USOC president) to the outright seizure of control of national governing bodies, the USOC has been on a steady campaign of complete and utter financial and legislative domination over the various sports in the Olympics.

A sport cannot take on a sponsor which conflicts with the official USOC sponsors; one example is U.S. Soccer, which dropped Philips Electronics after a multi-year partnership which even included an official (and somewhat lame) stadium chant. Its current electronics partner is Panasonic — one of the USOC’s family of sponsors.

Add all this mess to the current economic climate, and you might think making the Olympics was actually an obstacle, not an opportunity.

But given the 3,000 hours of broadband coverage that’s going to be available in the United States, it’s the greatest marketing opportunity that the team has ever had.