At the Buzzer: Parting Shots on Communication and Sport

This is the end of my tenth year as founding editor-in-chief of Communication & Sport. With the help of an exceptional team of associate editors (Andrew Billings, Marie Hardin, and David Rowe) who have graciously stayed with me as a “kitchen cabinet” for the duration of my time in the editor’s chair, the overarching “project” goals of this journal—to be integral to and to influence the advancement of the scholarly study of communication and sport—have been met in ways that have exceeded expectations. For their work, for the essential support of Susan Rice who has served as Editorial Operations Manager for the journal since its inception, for the strategies that Galen Clavio has put into place as Senior Editor for Scholarly Outreach, for the help offered by the now hundreds of internationally recognized scholars who have served on the Editorial Board, and the now thousands of others who have been called on as expert area reviewers, I am most thankful and appreciative.

Much has gone into making Communication & Sport a success story. Since inception, the support of SAGE Publishing—from its CEO Blaise Simqu, to now Vice-President for Research Eric Moran who “greenlighted” Communication & Sport as head of social science journals, to Martha Avtandilian who has been the best publishing editor I have had the pleasure of working with over my long career, to the marketing, web, and production teams who work “behind the scenes”—has been essential to the success of this project. Who could have imagined that an upstart journal in communication focused on an area that the field had been long resistant to would have recognized in 2018 with the prestigious PROSE Award as the Best New Journal in the Social Sciences? Who could have imagined that our current 2020 Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor for Communication & Sport would be 3.178? Who could have imagined the Communication & Sport would be ranked #28 of 94 journals in Communication, ahead of many foundational legacy journals of our scholarly societies? Who could have imagined that Communication & Sport would be ranked #35 of 58 journals in Hospitality, Leisure, Sport, & Tourism ahead of all but the International Review for the Sociology of Sport amongst research journals focused on the socio-cultural study of sport? Who could have imagined that Communication & Sport would grow from a quarterly publication with 400 annual pages in its first year to a bi-monthly research journal publishing over 1000 pages annually?

As I have said many times over in repurposing what can be seen in hindsight as an unfortunately oxymoronic Virginia Slims cigarette marketing slogan in supporting the women’s tennis tour to describe the scholarly field of communication and sport, “we’ve come a long way baby.” Although Communication & Sport was not the first scholarly journal to be published that focused on sport communication, there is much evidence that we have succeeded in becoming the “gold standard” for research in this area of inquiry. That we have garnered support from multiple major scholarly societies—from our primary organizational sponsors, the International Association for Communication and Sport (IACS) and the International Communication Association (ICA) Sports Communication Interest Group (SCIG), to the secondary sponsorship of the Media, Communication and Sport Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR)—has been integral to building our reputation and impact. We have been able to mark the field in distinct and important ways from competing outlets focused on communication and sport by putting communication, broadly defined, rather than sport, first amongst concerns in driving inquiry.

While communication and sport as a field and Communication & Sport as a research journal may have “come a long way baby,” it’s fair to say we have still got a long way to go. As I step away from the editor-in-chief role on what I hope is a high note, rest assured that the journal will be in good hands. Following a search coordinated by our publishing editor Martha Avtandilian at SAGE Publishing in concert with the executive leadership of our organizational co-sponsors, the IACS and the ICA’s SCIG, I am pleased that two leading scholars on my associate editor team, Andrew Billings and Marie Hardin, have been appointed as editors-in-chief of Communication & Sport with their term commencing atop 2022. The Billings and Hardin editorial team brings two key foundational scholars to lead Communication & Sport into its second decade. Their integrity and impact on communication and media studies is marked by their distinguished and very visible scholarly appointments. Andrew Billings is Professor and Ronald Reagan Chair of Broadcasting at the University of Alabama. Marie Hardin is Professor and Dean of the Bellasario College of Communications at Pennsylvania State University. As mentors to doctoral students at their respective institutions, Billings and Hardin have fostered a new and influential generation of sport-focused scholars now seated across communication and media studies.

I wish Andy and Marie, as well as the community of scholars who have contributed to the Communication & Sport project, the very best moving forward. I know that both are fond of the hockey great Wayne Gretsky’s aphorism to “skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” There will be continuing challenges to grow both the size of the communication and sport research community and the quality of inquiry. In the last fifteen years, as we have made meaningful progress in overcoming mainstream resistance to legitimizing the importance of research on communication and sport, we have seen both a striking growth of interest in the area and a flood of scholars across the world who have made this their dominant area of inquiry. As I have reflected on this state of affairs: it’s only taken about 40 years for communication and sport to become “an overnight success.”

That said, communication and sport remains a fragile scholarly space in many regards. Both external and internal threats persist. Outside the area, we still need to make a case to the skeptics who remain—most particularly some in communication studies, but also to others in media studies—and who may see our preoccupation with sport as somehow frivolous and populated by fans masquerading as scholars. And indeed, it is clear both that some part of the influx of interest in communication and sport as it has bloomed has been driven by fanship, and there are dangers that fanship and being unduly “sport-smitten” poses to scholarship. Fanship can blind the dispassionate skepticism that is essential to doing meaningful scholarship and criticism.

Scholars approaching sport are not immune to what the sport sociologist Coakley (2015) has called the “Great Sports Myth” (GSM). In very basic terms, the GSM hoists sport as panacea and is anchored in a “pervasive and nearly unshakable belief in the inherent purity and goodness of sport” (Coakley, 2015, p. 404). When new scholars enter our field, it is essential that they do not overestimate the value of sport and what may seem to be a ubiquitous interest in it. Most evidence suggests that not “everyone” is a sports fan; indeed, most men and even a greater proportion of women are not, and when they are fans, their fanship may not be broad and rather more likely is delimited to a specific sport or favorite teams or players. Sport, too, is not magic. It can do good things, but as a social elixir, it can be flawed and there can be other better solutions to advance both the individual and common good.

For communication and sport to progress on solid grounds, the scholarly community needs to be foundationally seated in skepticism rather than fandom. Sport matters. This is true socially, culturally, politically, and economically. We know this, and this needs to be at our scholarly core. We need to recognize, as I have argued for elsewhere, that the power of sport “rests on a conundrum, much like Kundera’s (1999) ‘lightness of being’ where we know life matters but we often act as though it is insignificant. With sport, we may act as though it matters, but in the end we know it is insignificant” (Wenner, 2009, p. 91). Yes, one can bask in the “thrill of victory” or be set back by the “agony of defeat” in watching (or even playing) sport, but the pathways of one’s life largely go on unaltered in substantive ways.

I bring up the GSM for another reason as well. Inquiry about communication and sport has drawn interest not only from those scholars seated in communication and media studies or those with foundational concerns in socio-cultural dynamics and impacts. It is exceedingly clear that for the study of communication and sport to thrive, it will have to be both a global endeavor and an interdisciplinary affair reaching well beyond the disciplinary confines of communication and media studies. Both necessities involve challenges. In striving to become more globally engaged, scholars whose first language is not English encounter a scholarly playing field that is in a fundamental sense unlevel. While the trendlines that have been made in advancing language translation software promise to mitigate this core issue somewhat, differences in cultural sensibilities about what constitutes the correct style and sufficient rigor for publishable scholarly inquiry remain considerable obstacles as many on editorial boards and reviewers rely on embedded norms. So, further diversification aimed at advancing international inclusion will be necessary to meaningfully enlarge the communication and sport tent.

On a related front having to do with enlarging the communication and sport tent, it is clear the study of communication and sport has attracted many scholars concerned with what might be called “sport communication as a profession” (Wenner, 2021) and the doing of “strategic sport communication” (Pedersen, 2013). In order to enable a sufficiently “big tent” to have viability, the study of communication and sport, in pragmatic ways, had to be “agnostic,” going beyond the strictly “socio-cultural” concerns that drive, for example, the sociology of sport. This means being inclusive of the considerable numbers of scholars who often see sport and sport communication in very different ways than those with foremost concerns over the socio-cultural processes underlying the communication, mediation, and mediatization of sport.

Indeed, the “health” of inquiry on communication and sport has been bolstered by growing numbers of scholars with priorities seated in advancing sport communication as a professional enterprise. This includes not only those fundamentally concerned with marketing, advertising, and public relations functions, but also with the doing of an “appealing” sport journalism that largely chronicles the day-to-day as a naturalized state-of-affairs and views this as meaningful and worthwhile to repeatedly celebrate. In doing so, they are willingly, and thus hegemonically, embracing a very different “worldview” about sport and its communication. Here, sport is taken in a “received” view, its purported “universalized virtues” are embraced in line with the GSM. Featured here, too often without question, is a received neoliberal worldview construction of sport, where marketplace priorities are seen as normal, natural, valued, and preeminent. As seated in sport management, this has enabled an academic enterprise that finds its legitimacy in making sport and “customer experiences” with it “bigger and better” and growing the role of communication that both celebrates and advances this.

As a long-time editorial board member of Sport Management Review and reviewer for the Journal of Sport Management, and having seen submissions to Communication & Sport from scholars (mostly) seated in sport management, it is unfortunately more typical than not to see research driven—often exclusively so—by how findings may help sport managers and marketers advance the reach and reception of their wares. Obviously, such a posture, at one with a little-questioned political worldview and focused on advancing the yield of those holding power in the sport marketplace, is quite at odds with a dispassionate social science disposition, let alone inquiry in the critical humanities. But this is a tension that is very much at play in the communication and sport scholarly space, and recognizing this and working toward some meaningful resolution is essential moving forward.

This will not be easy, and such challenges are not unique to the study of communication and sport. I hope that you will forgive me for pointing to some fundamental issues as I near passing Communication & Sport’s editorial baton to Andy and Marie. Indeed, over the course of this project, we have made a good case that the study of sport is inexorably linked to the study of its communication, mediation, and mediatization. That is something to celebrate. But celebrating sport and celebrating its communication is not our core remit. We need to keep our eyes on the prize, recognizing that communication in the context of sport is both powerful and influential, and more often than not, in its contemporary hypercommodified contexts, a conservative socio-cultural force. The pleasures that sport and its communication bring in engagement too easily mask the depth of its powers. In closing, let me join my good friend and colleague Rowe (2014) in his assessment of why communication and sport matters by invoking theorist Silverstone (1999, p. 152) about understanding today’s mediated world, “it’s all about power.”