Reflection
The past three months in sports and strategic communication have been a roller coaster. At the beginning of the semester, I dealt with unfortunate situations, which resulted in my losing focus on my courses. When I first decided to take this course, I was very excited because of the integration between sports and communications. After regaining my attention to this course, I understood my prior excitement for the course. Sports and strategic communication have taught me many things on regards to the ever-changing world of sports communication. Each assignment presented me with the opportunity to dwell on the different types of communication delivery. Three major assignments that sparked my interest were Athlete activism, Social media persona, and Feature story. These assignments allowed me to showcase my creativity and also put my developing communication skills to the test.
The assignment athlete activism asked us to highlight a moment or person in sports pertaining to activism. For my activist, I chose Arthur Ashe. My decision to select this particular athlete was because of him being a Virginia native. In the assignment, I talk about Arthur Ashe’s moments of activism against South Africa for its racist policies. Researching this particular topic informed me about Arthur Ashe’s life as well as his reasoning for his activism. I believe researching and fact checking a mandatory skills needed, and communication, and I now have the practice to feel confident in my future career for instances like these.
My favorite assignment was the social media persona. In this assignment, we, as students, had to display our social media presence that was sports-centered. I created a video recap showcasing my Instagram. Viewers had the chance to take a peek at how I showcase my love for sports. First, my highlight labeled “W.I.S” contains moments I captured while working sporting events here at ODU as a marketing intern. Second, I showed accounts I follow centered around sports content, added to this was a quick view of Nicole Lynn, one of the top female sports agents and coordinator of football at Klutch Sports Group. Last was a post of my best moments from the football season. This assignment helped me practice sports content creation to add to my portfolio.
Over the past three months in the Sport Communication course, I gained meaningful insights into the relationship between sports, media, and social influence. One of the most valuable aspects of the course was learning how athlete storytelling can be a powerful communication tool. For instance, in the “Athlete Activism” assignment, I explored Arthur Ashe’s resistance to apartheid in South Africa. This not only taught me about the political weight athletes can carry, but it also helped me understand how their platforms are used strategically to influence global and social issues. Researching Ashe’s story sharpened my ability to connect historical context with present-day sport narratives—a skill I plan to carry into any future work in sports journalism or athlete branding.
The last assignment is the feature story. With this, we had to create a narrative on the topic of sports . When reading the instructions for the feature story, I was very scared to do it because I had never written any type of narration. After sitting down and thinking about the assignment more, I came up with an idea. My story was about a young college football player who got injured, which resulted in him becoming depressed and unable to play football. His depression changed over time with the help of his new endeavor as a youth football team coach. The narrative style story was a piece of sports literature that was very new to me, but ended up being a great tool. I now feel confident in creating writing pieces of such style for practice to eventually add to my list of skills. Overall, this course was very helpful, and if I could, I would take it over with a fresh mindset to better grasp the course content.
