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Since Title IX was enacted in 1972, women’s advocates have considered how the law has affected female participation in sports, and critics have suggested that the law has unfairly denied opportunities to men. Studies have examined how journalists have covered Title IX and its consequences, yet few have looked at how advocacy groups have sought to influence coverage of the law. This textual analysis examines press statements published by the Women’s Sports Foundation from 2004 through 2009 and concludes that the organization used frames of community and transcendence in discussing women’s athletic participation. The foundation characterized community as essential to the support of women’s participation in sports and suggested that participation and achievement in sports were symbolic of women’s accomplishments in the larger society. The foundation also focused on fairness and equality as rationales for equitable distribution of resources and opportunities. Title IX was rarely mentioned in press statements.

This study explored how student-athletes at UNC-Wilmington (UNCW) used Twitter to help save their swimming and diving teams from being eliminated. Both a series of interviews and a content analysis of 1,775 tweets by 25 athletes were conducted. The results suggest that athletes and advocates can use Twitter to raise awareness about their cause. The UNCW athletes’ goal to demonstrate community support by alerting as many people as possible through social media was achieved through tweeting consistently, becoming opinion leaders in the two-step flow of information, and using weak ties to get followers of other accounts to rally behind their cause. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.

When compared with other disciplines, sport management educators are more likely to encounter student-athletes in their classrooms. While faculty mentoring is a key to student success for all, better understanding of this mentoring dynamic between sport management faculty and student-athletes is important to advancing pedagogical knowledge within the discipline. And perhaps, even more importantly, it can aid in creating a pathway for faculty advocacy and dispelling stigmas related to student-athletes. Consequently, the Mentor Role Instrument was used to determine if faculty mentorship of student-athletes differs by function type (RQ1) and if this was impacted by gender or faculty appointment (RQ2). An online survey of 88 sport management educators indicated that a significant difference was found, F(8, 783) = 44.16; p < .001, among mentoring function type. Friendship and Acceptance were the most prevalent mentoring functions, while Protection was the least frequent. Results did not indicate that gender or faculty appointment impacted faculty mentorship styles toward student-athletes.