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Rowan

To be fair to me, the weather was overcast today

In Rituals and Traditions today, we talked about the future of these things. How do you do that? Peer into my crystal ball, students, and see what I know, for I have thought long and hard about the hybridity of historic rituals with digital-first engagement. This is all about audience immersion, increasing fan accessibility, perhaps more personalized experiences, fancy gear and swag, and evolutions in youth sport.

Blending tech with tradition is going to be the goal in that future. This is going to further boost E-sports, more advanced virtual reality for athletes and fans. It’ll change how we experience live sport, we’ll be talking about mediated attendance which will become a ritual unto itself, and, what I’m excited about, historical reproductions. That led us to a discussion of alt-athletes, which is a term that never took off. Weekend warriors was just better alliteration, I guess. But the idea is sound. People want to play, and millennials are a huge marketplace here. The numbers I found said something like 76 percent of the people there, and much of it is about turning solo activity into team fitness and shared achievement. This looks like club teams and loose orgs, but they’ll vary with varied sports. Ultimately, this could become about finding meaning in sport and identity in exercise and recreation.

Also, you can turn that into a spectator event. In 2021 57,000 people gathered to watch the Crossfit Games. The US Open of surfing draws hundreds of thousands of spectators.

You wonder how many personal rituals are emerging in those athletes, and their fans.

We watched this documentary today in Criticism. It’s a good film, but this is the only clip they’ve put on YouTube, and it in no way explains things. Allow me.

In March 2008 — this story is getting old and I should probably take it out of rotation, but it’s good — a tornado bore down on downtown Atlanta. At the same time, the SEC basketball tournament was underway. A last second desperation shot forced overtime, and kept a bunch of people in the arena. And the arena got hit by the storm. The thought has always been that, perhaps, that shot saved a lot of people’s lives. Roll Tide. The tournament must go on, however, and there are other storms, the venue is unsafe, there are logistical considerations and there’s just a lot going on. We never think, really, when we go to a sporting event, about the hundreds and thousands of personnel hours that go into making an event happen, making it safe, making it enjoyable, and here they had to change plans mid-tournament, with the March Madness selection program just hours away.

Also, Georgia had an improbably run in that tournament. Still not sure how that happened. They weren’t good, but they played over their heads, and so the documentary is about that, too.

(My alma mater was hilariously in and out of the conference tournament in just the one game.)

And, yes, I spent part of the documentary reflexively glancing out the classroom windows. You just don’t break habits of living in places where you can get tornadoes.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

Spanish Armada viewpoint.

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26
Mar 26

Sports and sheep

We discussed sport consumption as a ritualized practice today in Rituals and Traditions.

It is a focus on entertainment value, collective group influence, and self-enhancement, but we overlook the ritual aspects, which potentially offer individuals a chance to maintain and to celebrate cultural meanings embedded in the consumption. There is a formalism to all of this, and also symbolic performance. For example, what do you do at tailgates? We also talked about the social interactions.

Ritual, I reminded them, is a means through which individuals embody the power, authority, and value of society. And we talked about research that shows that consumers cherish ritual experiences because securing cultural sense from mass-marketed consumer goods is not straightforward. Ritual makes it real for us, basically.

We talked about “ritual specialists” which is a concept I love. These are the elders, cheerleaders, band, media, supporter groups that have socially recognized authority to judge the importance of ritual and the performance’s correctness. These are the people who can legitimize the social importance of the ritual and give us the correct way of performing it. Then I got to use one of my favorite lines. “Because this is a communication studies class I have to occasionally sneak a theory in on you.” And I talked about disposition theory — basically our enjoyment is driven by our evaluations of the characters involved. This is part of why you think the traditions you like are good and important and the stuff that other people do is dumb. (You’ve evaluated them and found them wanting.)

In Criticism we watched It’s Time. For my money, it’s one of the best bits of storytelling you can get in a sport documentary. It’s also quite intense.

The only problem with it is that the runtime takes the whole class and we’ll have to wait until next Tuesday to discuss it. That’s a long time to wait, even for such a gripping and emotional story.

We won’t talk just about the emotion, though, but also the media aesthetics, like the music and some of the shot selections, and a few of the quotes from the people that were there.

I miss the roadside sheep already.

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24
Mar 26

Back to campus

Back to school today. Last week was spring break for the students and we’re all now trying to figure out how much enthusiasm everyone still has for the rest of the term. There’s a bit of rah-rah involved in that, but the weather is warming up, sporadically, and the days are getting longer and summer is calling.

Today in Rituals and Traditions we talked about sport as spectacle. This would be the aural expressions, the songs and chants, the visual displays, the stadium choreography and performances. This is about how seating works, fireworks, the music that’s played for us, the fancy digital court that we’re seeing in some college basketball tournaments, and so on.

In Criticism we talked about MLB labor: How fight over salary cap will shape negotiations:

There was something about the four-year, $72 million contract given to left-hander Tanner Scott in January that infuriated fan bases in every market outside of Los Angeles — even the only one that dwarfs it.

“It’s difficult for most of us owners to be able to do the kinds of things they’re doing,” New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner told the YES Network a week after the Scott deal.

That the Yankees — the most valuable franchise in baseball, the game’s foremost revenue machine, owners of the highest payroll each of the first 14 years this century — had joined the chorus typically reserved for smaller-market teams questioning the game’s fairness was no accident. Even if formal discussions about Major League Baseball’s next collective bargaining agreement are half a year away, the campaign to capture the hearts and minds of the paying consumers has already begun.

And also this story, Watershed moment as Russia’s sporting exile ends. These are both explainers, the latter is like a richly done FAQ, and so it worked out well that the class picked these two stories to discuss this week. Sometimes the stars lineup, where we can discuss complimentary themes.

At home, the sun is coming in through the back door. It’s just a plastic cat toy, but I like that we have enough attention to detail to see it casting a shadow.

Poseidon is fascinated by light, shimmering and reflecting light. If I ever need to move him in the evening a shadow puppet always does the trick. But they never notice long shadows in those parts of the day.

This was from Silverstrand Beach.

adventures / bluesky / cycling / IACS / research / Rowan / scholarship / weekend — Comments Off
14
Mar 26

The ‘Propaganda Peloton’ paper

The rare Saturday post here coincides with the second and final day of the International Association of Communication and Sport’s summit in Dublin, Ireland. I spent almost the entire night finishing up the slides and notes for my presentation today.

I did get about two hours of sleep, and arrived at the conference just in time to see a morning session that included a presentation by one of our former professors, and also her daughter, who is a law student at Syracuse. I have photos of that young woman as a very little girl, and have now watched her give research for a few years. She’s been studying Name, Image, and Likeness in the NCAA and I’ve been trying to make the case that she could graduate from law school and carve herself a substantial niche in that brand new area. Whatever she does, she’ll be brilliant at it, just like her mother.

Later I gave my last presentation of the conference. This was actually inspired by someone else’s paper from last year. I sat in a conference room in Chicago and jotted notes last March and thinking I could do a similar, but different work. I had a topic that no one researches, one only barely discussed in the popular media.

And, then, last September, la Vuelta a España took place. There, and in the months to follow, we had an instance where sportswashing most decidedly did not work. So I talked to one of our friends and Sports CaM colleagues, Dr. Julia Richmond. I knew the story, but she knows propaganda. We batted it around, and she figured out precisely the way we should frame the work.

This version of the research was titled “Propaganda peloton: Sportswashing in professional cycling.”

If you need a citation: Smith, K.D. & Richmond, J. C. (2026, March 13-14). “Propaganda peloton: Sportswashing in professional cycling. [Conference presentation].” IACS 2026 Summit, Dublin, Ireland.

So today I gave our little example of how and when and why sportswashing didn’t actually work. (It usually does.) All it took was the specific circumstances of the sport of road cycling, like the lack of liminal space between fans and athletes, a history of protest, a route through the Basque country and one other thing …

I’m presenting this paper at #IACS26 in a few moments on behalf of @rowanuniversity.bsky.social and The Center for Sports Communication and Social Impact.

If you were here you could hear how the story turns out.

If you are here, it’s in room E206.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 14, 2026 at 9:43 AM

Usually, sportswashing can be successful in road cycling. There are a lot of multinational petrochemical sponsors now. There are nation-states sponsoring teams. (Indeed, I used one of those to make a point in this presentation about budget disparities.) And while it can work in those other cases it didn’t work here because of genocide. By November, the Israel Premier Tech team was being denied entry into other races, riders were breaking contracts or outright retiring, IPT stepped away as the sponsor of the team in question a year early. Their owner also parted ways with the team.

And wouldn’t you know it, in the audience for this presentation was someone who knows all about this, and another scholar who has a friend that, until last year, drove for Premier Tech. But it’s interesting, and it worked because of what Richmond did to make it happen. I hope someone in the room knows her and tells her how I was bragging on her. She couldn’t be there, because she had to attend a wedding in the Caribbean.

He said jealously, in Dublin.

That’s two years in a row I’ve presented cycling research at this conference. I’m going to develop a reputation for doing that if I keep this up.

The IACS conference ended today. I attended a bunch of great sessions, met some lovely new people and saw some friends for all too short a period of time. Some of them we’ll see at next year’s conference. Others we won’t see until the conference goes abroad once again.

My lovely bride, who is the executive director of IACS, helped put on a great conference. Their largest ever attendance, despite this dumb new war in the Middle East keeping about four percent of the participants from attending. It was also their first hybrid conference with the people from Sport and Discrimination. And everyone seemed to have a good conference. Some of the board members celebrated at Il Corvo, a little four-star Italian restaurant just across the street. Because I know people, I was invited for this little dinner. I had the carbonara, which is a good litmus test for an Italian restaurant. If it’s good, you can be comfortable ordering other things on the menu. The carbonara was good. I guess we’ll have to come back again.

Poor me.

More on Monday, when we’ll be spring breaking.

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13
Mar 26

The ‘That’s It, That’s it, I quit!’ paper

At the International Association for Communication and Sport summit my lovely bride and I presented some interesting and unique research. We met the friend of some friends and he was telling us about why he quit playing fantasy sports. It was an interesting conversation and led to a pretty basic research question: why?

It turns out that while there’s a reasonable amount of scholarship about why people gamble and play fantasy sports, there’s not a lot of work done studying why they quit. So we’re cornering the market. And here’s the first bit of that work, a pilot study. We told some of the best sports media scholars in the world about it today. She discussed the quantitative part of the mixed-methods study, and left me to discuss the qualitative themes. Here’s some of the takeaways, which I’ve already shared on Bluesky.

This version of the research was titled “That’s it, I quit!: An analysis between the relationship of quitting sports gambling and enjoyment.”

If you need a citation: Smith, L.R. & Smith, K.D. (2026, March 13-14). “That’s it, I quit!: An analysis between the relationship of quitting sports gambling and enjoyment.” [Conference presentation]. IACS 2026 Summit, Dublin, Ireland.

Just presented some new research with @laurensmith.bsky.social. Turns out there’s not a lot of work done studying why people stop playing fantasy sports.

Let’s dive in!

#IACS26

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 13, 2026 at 8:45 AM

We met a guy who had strongly passionate feelings about why he no longer played fantasy sports. So we developed a mixed-methods instrument to study it. We approached this from a motivations perspective.

@laurensmith.bsky.social used PANAS and ENJOY on the quantitative side.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 13, 2026 at 8:45 AM

We learned, from one person, that you can actually do some version of UFC fantasy sports.

We also learned, from other great scholarship, that gambling has the highest suicide rate of any addiction disorder (Vijayakumar &
Vijayakumar, 2023).

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 13, 2026 at 8:45 AM

Lauren broke down the quantitative data, I unpacked a bit of the qualitative. We had 50 respondents, 37 identified as male, 12 as female. The slide below has a few standout answers. Most said they quit because of the time invested, loss of money, loss of interest, stress, changing life priorities.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 13, 2026 at 8:45 AM

Eighty percent of the respondents could point to a specific incident that motivated them to quit. Most revolved around lost money, time spent, stress from building and dealing with lineups and, curiously, dissatisfaction with player performance and player injuries.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 13, 2026 at 8:45 AM

We asked the quitters group where they spend their time now. Fully 60 percent said nothing about watching sports. Some 18 percent of them used specific phrase like “stress, attention, focus, relaxing.” Work, spending time with family, exercise filled in the time. So did video games and reading.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 13, 2026 at 8:45 AM

Nineteen of the 50 respondents wish they had quit sooner. The rest said no. Only one person, as you see here, indicated any regret at not playing.

Thirty-eight percent said they’d play again. All of those said they would impose limitations and low stakes on their participation.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 13, 2026 at 8:45 AM

We wondered if they missed it; 36 percent said they do not.

Of the rest, 30 percent missed the competition, 18 percent missed the social aspects of fantasy sports. Sixteen percent we categorized as other.

Almost all said what they DON’T miss is the stress involved or the time invested.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 13, 2026 at 8:45 AM

Eight members of the quitters group said they’d spent more than $1,000 playing fantasy sports. The highest was $5,000. A personal appeal made them stop. They talked at length about how things have turned around for them.

One person self-reported spending 800 hours a year on fantasy sports.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 13, 2026 at 8:45 AM

Now if you’ll excuse me, after a day full of conferencing, and an evening full of networking and socializing with friends and colleagues, I have to finish my notes for tomorrow’s presentation.