ABSTRACT
This chapter posits that sport as an industry holds important modifiers when applying Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) to certain types of sports crises. It explains the context of crisis communication and the development of SCCT. Crisis communication emerged when developing interest in crisis management became a distinct area of interest for practitioners and researchers in the 1980s. The chapter explores the reputational nature of sports crises through athlete reputational crises (ARC) and considers the application of SCCT to athlete reputational crises. Within the scope of ARC, there are a variety of crisis types. Consistent with the organizational crisis communication literature, ARC research found that crisis type does shape attributions and reactions of stakeholders. In SCCT, contextual modifiers are factors influencing how people attribute crisis responsibility and influence the crisis response selection. Sport is a major global industry, but has some unique contextual factors that seem to affect the selection and effectiveness of crisis response strategies.
