That’s the International Association for Communication and Sport to you and me.
We woke up this morning ready for IACS. Still jet-lagged, but sure of where we were, and grateful we made it in time to participate in the conference. Travel issues aside, knowing where you are when you wake up is a good thing. And I’ve become an incredibly poor traveler. It takes me a day or two to get on the right schedule. So far, though, I am impressing myself today. He said, after the rare mid-day nap.
But that’s getting ahead of things.
Our hotel has a fine breakfast. The dining area is just off the check-in lobby, and at the host stand someone is waiting to ask you your room number. They check that number against a list. And, as we ordered breakfast, we’re on the list.
So a guy is standing there waiting to talk to guests.
“Hola. Buenas dias. Número de habitación, por favor.”
504.
And, without a moment’s hesitation, “Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I am the hotel manager. We are sooooo very sorry about your experience last night.”
So word has gotten around.
Breakfast was fine. We then walked the 400 meters to another hotel where this actual conference was taking place. Here’s The Yankee delivering some of her most recent research to her sports scholar colleagues.
She loves this crowd, and they all love her, too. She said later in the day that this was her favorite conference, but she didn’t need to say that, it was obvious. She was among her people. Similar academic interests and, pleasantly, no big egos.
My lovely bride has been studying the American coverage of the Olympics for almost 20 years now. These are the things we know for certain. Primetime NBC coverage is aimed at a female audience. Fifty-six percent of the audience is female and NBC knows this. So there’s an emphasis on storytelling, and there are no combat sports shared during primetime. Some 60 percent of NBC’s primetime coverage is given over to women’s sports. (Conversely, ESPN famously devotes about six percent of their coverage to women.) All of this, her research says, makes the NBC Olympic coverage the largest media coverage of women’s sports.
And! This year, for the first time ever … women were allowed to be smart.
This might seem like a small thing, but media portrayals matter. Is an athlete athletic or a mom, or tough, or someone’s girlfriend or gritty or whatever. In these last games, commentators tied a woman’s intelligence was to a quality performance.
Now, I guess, the question is whether that will turn into a trend over the course of the next several Olympics.
Speaking of intelligence … The second most interesting thing that happened at the conference today was that the daughter of one of our grad school professors presented some of her original research. She’s a junior in undergrad at Florida, and a thoughtful, talented young woman who brought her junior thesis about collegiate athletes and NIL to all of these noted scholars and … it was really, really good. Really good.
As soon as the panel was over, two professors approached her and started recruiting her for grad school. The Yankee was writing down ideas about how the two of them should work together. Her mother, our former professor, is an incredibly gifted scholar, so none of this is surprising. But it’s no less impressive. Most of us, almost none of us, weren’t doing this kind of work or presentation in undergrad. It was quite exciting.
In the evening, we walked down to the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí’s famously unfinished church.
We’ll be visiting there on Sunday.
But there’s more conferencing tomorrow!
When we got back to our room this evening there was a fresh fruit plate, a chilled bottle of champagne and a note from the hotel manager, again apologizing for last night.
This is a good hotel, a really fine place, and they’re proving it. Not that we asked, in any way, for this sort of treatment. But we’ve quickly come to appreciate Spanish hospitality.
