March 7, 2019
As a second year assistant professor in the Division of Sport Management, I am extremely excited about working with Cheyenne Ross, one of the undergraduate coordinators with the Writing Across Communities (WAC) program at St. John’s University. I believe she brings a fresh new perspective to my idea of fundamentally transforming my class, Managerial Aspects of Sport Management (SPM, 1004). Last summer, I was awarded a St. John’s University Seed Venture Grant to buy photographic equipment to record interviews with sport management practitioners in the Tri-State area. As New York City is fertile soil for sports business, with the Big 4 leagues (i.e. NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA) being headquartered in Manhattan and a host of feeder industries (i.e., sport marketing firms, advertising agencies) being settled in the outer boroughs, I was able to secure interviews with individuals working in these aforementioned industries. I spent the entire summer of 2018 making cold calls to prospective interviewees and networking with my industry connections to get a cross section of the most significant sport management professionals.
Suffice it to say, this project did not go as planned. I was so excited about deploying this elusive content in my class that I papered over the detailed work involved in integrating this proprietary information into the course objectives. I would often find myself frontloading the content without providing more backdrop to explain to students the occupational capacity of the interviewees as well as the macro level implications of their industry. Because I had failed to make these connections—between the macro and the micro—the rollout and activation of the videos often fell flat. I also believe that one of the drawbacks to this way of delivering the content was the very fact that it was asynchronous by design. As the campus is in Queens, it is prohibitive for the participants to beat rush hour commutes from Manhattan or Eastern Long Island. Because I had three months off for the summer, I made the interview process convenient for the participants by recording them in their office.
Disadvantages aside, I am looking forward to working with the WAC team to rehabilitate this idea. I believe Cheyenne will help me better understand how millennials would like to be engaged through multimedia. After our first two meetings, we have already put together different writing assignments that have the potential to be student-centered. One idea is to create a menu of video snippets that students will respond to through a differentiated learning writing assignment. For example, I can tease out vignettes of professionals discussing the particulars of their job to trigger a student reflection on whether they are made for the job in question. An assignment like this could dispel the romanticist beliefs that some students may have about breaking into the sports industry. When I majored in communications with a concentration in sports public relations as an undergraduate student, I had fleeting expectations of spending a lifetime working in-house for the Green Bay Packers until I was humbled during a semester-long writing assignment. No sooner had I realized that writing press releases in Associated Press Style did not align with my skillset, than I started the process of applying to graduate school. I hope we can create more meaningful writing assignments to trigger a life changing experience similar to my backgrounder assignment 14 years ago.