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Mentoring has typically been studied in business environments, with fewer studies focusing on academic contexts and even fewer in the field of sport management. This study examined the mentoring relationships, and specifically the mentoring functions that occurred among sport management doctoral dissertation advisors (mentors) and their doctoral students (protégés). Semistructured telephone interviews were conducted with 13 individuals. Participants collectively described examples of all of Kram’s (1988) mentoring functions, with coaching, counseling, and exposure and visibility cited most frequently. Fewer instances of protection and direct sponsorship were mentioned, although there was evidence of considerable indirect sponsorship. Protégés provided more examples of role modeling as compared with their mentors, and the entire process of completing a doctoral degree can be viewed as a challenging assignment. A discussion of these findings within the context of the relevant previous academic literature and suggestions for future research are also provided.

Previous research has suggested the potential for enduring and influential messages (otherwise known as memorable messages) to serve as mechanisms of athlete socialization but has failed to explore how these messages might help athletes adjust to their teams. This study used open-ended questionnaires to explore how the memorable messages that Division-I student-athletes receive before their college career influence them before and after they join their teams, as well as the associations between message content and function. The results of this study indicate that memorable messages shape student-athletes’ attitudes, expectations, and participative decisions before beginning their college careers and their attitudes, relationships, and performance once they began their careers. However, few associations between message content and functions were observed, and no associations between student-athletes’ sex and sport type with message functions were observed. These results highlight the role of discourse in sport socialization by revealing that specific messages help prepare and acclimate student-athletes for college athletics. However, this study fails to provide insight into why specific functions might occur.

The purpose of this study was to examine endorsement-related tweets from athletes and determine which characteristics of those tweets could increase the degree of electronic word-of-mouth marketing (eWOM) generated by the message. Previous literature has suggested that the retweet function in Twitter is a form of eWOM. Through the lens of eWOM, the concepts of vividness, interactivity, and congruence are used to understand what tweet characteristics generate the most retweets. A sample of professional-athlete endorsement and sponsored tweets (n = 669) was used and coded based on frameworks adapted from previous studies. Results indicated that the interaction between levels of high vividness and high interactivity generated the highest frequency of retweets. Reported findings could inform athletes and/or brand managers in ways to increase the eWOM of sponsored messages on Twitter.

Internships permit sport management students to link classroom learning to the professional environment. Since internships provide students with opportunities to learn on-the-job and test their skills in the marketplace, the experiences should be uniformly beneficial to all students regardless of gender. This study was conducted to describe internship work conditions (i.e., opportunities to perform in essential marketplace functions) for male and female sport management interns assigned to ‘Big Four’ professional sport organizations. Participants were 74 sport industry professionals who supervised a total of 103 interns over a one-year period. A X² Test of Independence found that male and female interns working in professional sport had comparable opportunities to perform and learn on the job. Differences in opportunity, hiring practices, and on-the-job benefits emerged primarily as a function of job specialization (e.g., operations, marketing, venue management), league/association, or gender of the internship supervisor rather than gender of the interns.

Outsourcing in sport is not a new phenomenon. Specifically, outsourcing in intercollegiate sport has become common among athletic departments across the NCAA. While outsourcing can be employed to generate increased revenues via enhanced sales, marketing, or fundraising functions, many midmajor institutions are utilizing outsourcing partners exclusively to manage ticket sales. As such, this case presents a scenario in which an athletic director and her management team are faced with assessing three options related to ticket sales outsourcing at a midmajor NCAA Division 1 institution. Utilizing the lens of multi criteria decision-making, financial, nonfinancial, and circumstantial data are provided for readers to address an outsourcing decision in the context of intercollegiate athletics. By examining three options including maintaining the status quo, considering another outsourcing partner, or bringing ticket sales operations in-house, this case provides an opportunity for students to investigate the role of ticket sales outsourcing as it relates to revenue generation, a pertinent issue for athletic departments across the NCAA.