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Using theories of framing and agenda setting, this study explores how journalists covered women athletes during the first week of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s new “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) policy. Athlete representation during this first week was critical, as it established precedent for which athletes, according to media members, held value and were worthy of publicity. The findings from this study show that journalists focused their reporting of NIL on U.S. male athletes, although women athletes such as Olivia Dunne, Haley Cavinder, and Hanna Cavinder were also frequently mentioned in relation to their large social media following, lifestyle, or appearance. Overall, reporters generally promoted a male-dominated NIL agenda, one that undervalued women athletes and minimized their potential role as sporting celebrities in the college sports space.

There is a continuing interest in the relationship between sport and nature. As a new field, sport ecology explores the impact sport has on the natural environment and how sport organizations and individuals can promote sustainability. However, a critical element is still missing in the sport ecology discourse—the link between organizations’ sustainability efforts and their value co-creation processes. The circular economy can provide this link by decoupling the value co-creation of sport business models from their environmental impact and resource depletion. Based on an extensive literature review, this study provides a new theoretically derived typology of circular sport business models, including comprehensive reasoning about sustainable value co-creation processes in the sport industry. It explains how sport managers of all three sectors—for-profit, public, and nonprofit—can transition toward more sustainable and circular business practices and offer integrative guidelines for future research.

This commentary introduces the second of two special issues in the International Journal of Sport Communication centered on social media and sport. The empirical studies presented in this issue illustrate both the diversity of topics and methodological approaches utilized by researchers working at the intersection of social media and sport. Research articles in this issue analyze topics ranging from sport consumer behavior to online fan communities to coaches’ perceptions of activism-related content posted on team social media accounts. The research presented here also employs a variety of methodological approaches including experimental design, critical discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, and applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Collectively, these studies offer a foundation on which future research in social media and sport can build to continue to enhance our understanding of social media’s impact on the sport world.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic created an unpredictable environment regarding the safety operations of sport and recreation organizations. This study was designed to examine how safety climate and organizational innovativeness could promote preferred organizational behavior outcomes in college campus sport and recreation centers. A total of 227 sport and recreation employees were recruited through the National Intramural and Recreational Sports Association. With the collected data, we employed structural equation modeling to assess the research hypotheses. The results indicated that safety climate and innovativeness positively influenced job engagement, therefore leading to enhanced safety compliance and employee innovativeness, which ultimately resulted in higher levels of organizational performance. Peer safety compliance was also found to be a moderator in the relationship between job engagement and safety compliance. In this study, the authors offer new insights into sport organizational performance by emphasizing safety and innovation.

The purpose of this study was to identify the supports and barriers women coaches experience at the organizational level and to determine how those factors influence interpersonal- and individual-level factors within their coaching context. Nine women who coach high school basketball were interviewed at two time points and asked to reflect on organizational-level factors relative to their coaching position and how those factors have shaped their coaching experience over time. Based on the results of the interviews, two organizational-level factors were identified as barriers for participants: navigating inconsistent hiring practices and hypermasculine culture within school sport. The participants described organizational-level factors as influencing their experiences at both interpersonal (e.g., support from mentors, barriers related to the athletic directors) and individual (e.g., age, experience, sexual orientation) levels. The findings provide empirical support for specific organizational factors that contribute to interpersonal- and individual-level coach experiences. The power structures embedded in these associations are defined and discussed.