After 50 Years of Sports Media Scholarship, the Academy Takes Notice

Higher education institutions-especially those in North America-appear recently to have bestowed their imprimatur on sports media as a field of academic study through the codification of curricula and conferring of sports media-specific degrees, embracing the "toy department" as a stop-gap measure to address university budget shortfalls. 1 The groundwork is set for sports media to be a growth area in mass communication and sports studies education.These new academic programs are popular with students but also tend to "predominately focus on skills-oriented and preprofessional courses." 2 Thus, sports media courses prepare students for industry-related jobs, but the offerings lack social and historical context of why sport matters to society and individuals risk replicating structures that have marginalized groups within sports such as women, people with disabilities, and individuals from the Global South. 3 However, sports media curricula developers can learn much from decades-old studies of the convergences of sports and communication into an entity rich with cultural, economic, and social implications. 4To provide students and scholars with a well-rounded perspective, increased intentionality in the development of curriculum and coursework in sports media connected to the sociocultural implications of the MediaSport theoretical framework is necessary and warranted. 5he subsequent portions of this essay provide rationales for various curricula considerations.