For my part in the conference today I spoke on panel titled Games of Power: The Weaponization of Sport for Political Gain.
The premise of the panel acknowledges the long history of sport as a battleground, the interrelationships of politics and sport, and the dynamics of regional and national interests that are oftentimes at play. The topics included how sport functions as a contested space where political actors, institutions, and movements seek to assert power, shape narratives, and mobilize public opinion, often while using sport as a weapon.
I talked about identity fusion theory, within the context of nationalism, using the Winter Olympics and the men’s locker room hockey phone call example.
I later asked the question, “What is it to be a 28-year-old athlete, on a gold medal high, and laughing at a punchline from the president of the United States?” I also talked about sport as a soft power, and how that political influence and persuasion might be changing. (The Global Soft Power Index seems to think the U.S. numbers are softening.)
Ultimately, I said this should perhaps be a conversation about sport in a new era. If that sounded wise it was only because of what my colleagues on the panel said after that.
I will take part in two more panels tomorrow. The rest of my day I spent in various audiences, doing the Academic Nod.
This evening, before dinner, we caught some fireworks almost by chance.
Call me old fashioned, but I think fireworks should be memorialized. That’s a lot of sound and fury … and some money … that someone is exploding for no real reason. The least we can do is record it and view it from every conceivable angle.
This series of percussive explosions wasn’t even about nationalism. Call me old fashioned again, but I miss the days when fireworks displays meant something. They told a story, dagnabbit!
Don’t mind me, I’m going to go yell at this cloud of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide.
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?
That is Cuan na hAisléime … (still not a series of letters that comes readily to my typing fingers) another casual side-of-the-road view that would be an absolute show stopper most anywhere else.
It is funny, how we all cope with chilly weather in different ways. Phoebe, here, is trying out a bit of late morning sunshine.
Poseidon went for one of his old favorites, a bundle of covers.
It only got to 56 degrees today, but the kitties are doing fine. They like it warm, of course, but they have fur and sunbaths and covers and kitty caves and so on. Me, I have to walk into class and pretend to be excited while it is 56 degrees outside! Hooray spring, guys! We won’t see the 60s until the weekend.
In Rits and Trads today we talked about media rituals, we talked about the characters the media helps create and accentuate, and the atmosphere they create. We talked about how we see military flyovers and see someone sing the national anthem at big events, so we talked about nationalism. We also talked about things like player introductions and postgame interviews. We talked about the Olympic ceremonies and other things the media participate in. And we talked about Rich Eisen running the 40 for charity, and the simulcam replays. Hands down the best part of the football year.
In Criticism we talked about media framing and representation, using these two stories.
Sophia Wilson says being a mom has helped with her “goldfish mentality” of living in the moment.
Wilson was named to the U.S. national team roster for three upcoming matches against Japan, starting April 11 in San Jose, California. She took time away from soccer for the birth of her daughter and has not played for the United States in 17 months.
“I feel like my perspective on just life in general has shifted a lot, I think, in all the best ways,” Wilson said Thursday. “I feel more grounded, I feel more present. And I think that’s how I view the game as well. I’m trying to approach it with — I always have, but I think more than ever — a goldfish mentality. It’s just, be present in whatever practice, whatever game I’m in, and then it’s on to the next.”
[…]
“Watching her play 70 minutes the other night, it was almost like I couldn’t believe she’s had a baby and come back to perform at the level she’s done,” U.S. coach Emma Hayes said. “Real, real credit to her and the team around her that have really positioned pre- and post-pregnancy planning in a fantastic way.”
People that research gender representation in sports media are often critical about how women are portrayed in coverage. My argument, for several years now, has been that we don’t properly celebrate these sorts of comebacks. She is a mother, yes. She’s also one of the world’s best athletes. And she’s returned to form. Emma Hayes is going to talk about that, and she should. Others should, as well. And so I got to wax on about that for a bit.
“We always said we would never be able to wrestle in college,” said Jamilah, 22.
Coaches recognized their talent when they were teenagers, but they couldn’t wrestle with boys, nor could they wear the required wrestling singlet — due to their faith.
Eventually their passion for the sport – and their perseverance – led to rule changes allowing Muslim women to compete in full-body uniforms at collegiate and national levels.
It’s probably comical when I, the white guy, talk about representation. But there’s a bunch of people that need to think about it, and some of them are in my classroom. They’re just stuck with me at this point.
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?
We saw several places that didn’t have signs or historical significance or car pullouts, they were simply majestic. That’s where you’d want to live, safe on a hill high above it, looking down on this glory, pondering time and patience, and everything in between. For more ocean dramatics, go here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s the deal I, a southern boy, have made in my decade of living in northern climes. Below a certain temperature, I don’t go outside if I don’t want to. At the same time, I acknowledge that life has brought me to a place where winter happens. (Items one and two here generally take of each other.) If winter is going to happen, it should stick within certain calendar confines. (I never get my way on this one, really, I mean look at us.) Anything after February 14th won’t do, because, back home, trees are budding and the lilies have burst through the soil and the jonquils aren’t far behind. Winter is going to happen, though, and so I will accept days that are cold and bright, or dull and warmer. The wrong combination there is unwanted. And, somewhere in February, because I can’t have spring on schedule, I begin to think things like “Oh this feels awfully warm!” and it is 51 degrees. This is the Stockholm Syndrome that comes in the last third of winter.
The last third, because we’re not done yet.
There has been entirely too much of this in the atmosphere for March.
Walking into our building on campus today I could see my breath. This wasn’t so much about the cold, but the dew point. It was one of those days where everything felt like it would be cold soggy forever.
In Rits and Trads we wrapped up the student presentations of traditions they found. Someone actually showed off the Red Wings thing. While they love it in Detroit, where it is presumably gray until May, this strikes me as problematic for a lot of people.
Another student showed a video from his high school, which was cool, but I’ll never find again. The idea was how they integrated the marching band and the football team taking the field. It was simple, and neat.
Someone discussed the Red Sox playing Sweet Caroline. Fits the bill. Crowd loves it.
And the Buffalo Bills do a Mr. Brightside thing now, which is on its way to becoming a tradition, it looks like.
Admittedly, these guys right here aren’t the best singers, but this is all about the choreographed stadium atmosphere. The Buffalo snow probably helps.
I wonder if they’ll take this song, and emerging tradition, next door to the new stadium this year.
In Criticism, we watched this documentary, which I thought was fascinating, as it takes on issues of gender, politicization, culture, history, and colonization. It’s a slow start, which allows the whole story to breathe, but most of the last half hour feels like a sports film. Also, it shocks the sensibilities a bit to see 8th and 9th and 10th graders having to fight to play a sport they love.
We talked about those things, and a few others, after the film, which is now 10 years old. Apparently not a lot of people have seen it, but maybe more should.
It’s a good way to avoid a bit of winter, I’d say.
Woke up tired, going to end it that way. And was tired most the way throughout. It was another busy and full day, too. When last we talked, I was taking a brief break from the big job packet. Yesterday was the clear-my-head-of-it day. Tonight, I started working on a dead tree edit.
You can edit the file you’re working on, but there’s a lot more you can catch on paper. At least that’s what I tell myself. It has the added benefit of being true. Also, this is a mortifying exercise.
I found the first typo on the Table of Contents. By page four I found my sixth correction.
It went on like that, for about 15 pages, which was just about all I could stand tonight. I’ll do the rest in the morning, and send it off.
I’ve read Dillard, I’ve admired Steinbeck’s journals, and Sarton’s memoirs. I’m sure they’re all more interesting than that, and — though it has been a while since I’ve read some of them, I don’t recall them talking a lot about editing comma splices and redundancies.
Today in Rituals and Traditions the students presented some interesting traditions that they found. I’m sure they all worked tirelessly, evaluating any number of these things from across the country and the world, studiously evaluating the premise behind any number of these things from all of the sports. That, I hope, is what they took from my directions. I wanted them to find something interesting, figure out where it came from, and tell us a bit about the thing. Why does it matter, and so on. The goal was to expose everyone in the class to a bunch of new ideas. You never know from whence inspiration will come. By and large, that’s exactly what they did.
Someone showed us a video of lighting the beam.
Someone else talked about the milk at the Indy 500.
And we also talked about how the Philadelphia Union bang a drum.
And maybe the inspiration will be that we wire a light to a drum, a drum soaked in milk, and then the most valuable player of the game will hit the drum over and over until the stadium lights come on. And then we’ll throw octopus on the playing surface. That Detroit Red Wings tradition keeps coming up in class, somehow.
In the Criticism class we talked about two pieces. The students picked these, and if nothing else it lets me prove there’s something to take away from anything we can read. Take, for instance, this column from The Athletic. The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room:
In the immediate aftermath of their victory, the team took a customary, congratulatory call from President Donald Trump, and some players laughed at a misogynistic joke about the gold-winning women’s hockey team that many Americans wouldn’t find funny. They celebrated in the locker room with beer-chugging FBI Director Kash Patel, who is now under scrutiny for using taxpayer money to fund a sports getaway. Then, after a wild night of partying in Miami following their return from Italy, some members of the team announced plans to step in the House Chamber – a stage upon which symbolism is never neutral – and make an appearance at Trump’s State of the Union.
In normal times, this would be an obligatory celebration for a championship team. They take presidential calls. They party too hard. They visit Washington and stroll through the corridors of power.
But this isn’t a neutral climate. This isn’t a neutral president. And in a nation this polarized, the proximity carries weight whether the players are being intentional or merely naive. America no longer experiences these rituals in the same way, and it may never again. Athletes would be wise to recognize that, in this climate, celebration is easily repurposed into political capital.
So we talked about how columns are different than articles, because we live in a time where people don’t read enough to have learned to distinguish between the two. It is, and take my word for it, a real problem.
That piece also let us talk about the Miracle of Ice, which at least one person was not at all familiar. So, as I reminded myself these are 21st century students, I tried to paint pictures about the Cold War, the Carter administration, small fuzzy TVs and nationalism. So we also talked about nationalism in sport, and the politics of sports in two different ways. And then the propaganda value of politicians (of any stripe) glomming on to successful sportsball teams.
All of which is what I planned on at the beginning of the semester, even if they didn’t.
Nick Castellanos watched from right field as Orion Kerkering’s ill-advised throw home sailed over catcher J.T. Realmuto to end the Phillies’ season.
Castellanos saw the Dodgers pour out of the third-base dugout, sprinting past a stunned Kerkering to swarm Andy Pages at first base to celebrate their 2-1 walk-off National League Division Series-clinching win.
Then, Castellanos broke into a sprint of his own. He rushed past the euphoric Dodgers on the infield dirt to get to a visibly emotional Kerkering.
“That’s second nature. That’s instinct,” Castellanos said. “I understand what he’s feeling. Not the exact emotions, but I can see them. I didn’t even have to think twice about it, that’s where I needed to run to.”
And here we talked about tone and intentions and beat writers. There’s something to learn in every story. At least for me.
