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Eddie G. Walker II
David Pierce, James Johnson, John Miller, and Benjamin Downs
Sport management is a rapidly changing and highly competitive field. With over 200 graduate and over 400 undergraduate degree programs in the United States, faculty are tasked with regular assessment of their program’s curriculum to ensure that students graduate with the knowledge, skills, values, and opportunities that make them marketable in a competitive marketplace. The purpose of this study was to describe and identify trends in the admission requirements, coursework, and culminating experiences for degree completion in sport management graduate programs in the United States. Content analysis was used to collect data from university websites and course catalogs on 230 sport management master’s degree programs. Minimum grade point average (GPA) standards were listed for 52% of programs, 44% required test scores for admission, and 28% did not require either a test score or GPA. Law, marketing, and research methods were the only three courses required by more than 70% of programs. At least one research-related course (research methods, statistics, or sports data analytics) was required by 78% of programs. One third of programs prescribed a specific course sequence to earn a graduate degree, while two thirds provided students with options on how the degree could be completed. Only 7% of programs required students to complete a thesis, and 27.8% required a comprehensive examination.
James Bingaman
The current study sought to explore the prevalence of uncivil discourse surrounding the Washington NFL team’s removal of offensive Native American imagery and later rebranding as the Washington Commanders. The study employed a quantitative content analysis to assess comment sections of news stories on a sports blog between 2014 and 2022. In addition to uncivil discourse, contextual elements such as popularity, reciprocity, and directionality of incivility were also examined. Dovetailing with existing research, roughly one quarter of all comments featured an element of uncivil discourse, with derogatory slurs toward Native Americans being particularly common. Additionally, contextual elements served important roles in the facilitation of incivility. Taken together, the results point to some of the antisocial behavior that can occur in seemingly innocuous online spaces that often reflect broader social and political turmoil related to Native American imagery in sport.
Bo Li, Olan K.M. Scott, Stirling Sharpe, and Qian Zhong
International sport has always been associated with nationalism. The purpose of the study was to explore how Chinese media and the general public perceived the doping scandal of their national sports hero, Sun Yang. Through analyzing 11 Chinese media outlets’ coverage on Chinese social media Weibo, the results revealed that Chinese media covered Sun and his team’s reaction and perspectives on this issue more when compared with other news. The general public’s perceptions toward this scandal tended to be favorable toward Sun, with 55.5% of selected Weibo comments defending Sun after his 8-year ban for doping was handed down. The analysis of these social media comments posted by sports fans showed that the general public’s perceptions might have been impacted by their nationalism, international relations, and media coverage. In addition, the study revealed the Chinese public’s perceptions toward current antidoping regulations.
Gashaw Abeza and Jimmy Sanderson
A key feature of a robust academic discipline is that its homegrown theories and investing in theory contribute to building good research. In the field of sport and social media research, the rigorous utilization of theory is one of the areas where the field is still facing “disciplinary pain.” In fact, the unique features of social media provide researchers in the sport research community with a valuable opportunity for proposing, testing, applying, critiquing, comparing, integrating, and expanding theories. In this commentary, the authors, based on their own experience (as researchers, readers, and reviewers of social media in sport), contend that reference resources are lacking on this topic to help young (or existing) researchers locate appropriate theories for their research. Hence, this work identifies, documents, and discusses the theories used, advanced, and developed in social media research for sport studies. Furthermore, a compilation is brought together of different theories from various disciplines that researchers in this community may consider for their future work.
Katherine Sveinson and Kim Toffoletti
Sport organizations are developing family-friendly spectator initiatives to boost engagement and sales to parents and children. While the number of women sport fans continues to grow, research has yet to explore how women, as mothers and fans, experience fandom. Informed by a maternal geography framework, this study explores women’s understanding of what does or does not make game-day experiences family-friendly by presenting the accounts of 15 women from North America and Australia who are sport fans and mothers. Interpretive phenomenological analysis is utilized to investigate how mothering as a spatially informed care practice shapes the perspectives of what constitutes a family-friendly sport spectating experience. Findings identify key components of the physical, structural, and social environments of women’s experiences of family-friendly sport fandom, as well as exposing that what is presumed to be family-friendly is not the same as mother-friendly.
