ABSTRACT
More than 2,700 sport communicators work in college athletics in the US and Canada (CoSIDA, 2012a).Working in units designated as “sports information,” “media relations,” or “athletics communications,” they serve as the public relations (PR) person or staff for their institution’s athletics department (Miloch and Pedersen, 2006).They have also been described as the “primary gatekeepers in the PR process inside college athletics, the portals through which vital information on multi-million dollar teams flows to the sport media and public at large” (Battenfield and Kent, 2007, p. 237).This chapter provides an overview of the field of college athletics communications. It begins with a brief history of the profession, which includes information on the establishment of the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA). This leads to a discussion of the job responsibilities professionals (for example, sports information directors) in the field typically assume and the related benefits and challenges commonly associated with such work. The chapter then moves to a discussion of how the field has changed in recent years. Topics include the impact of social media and the changing roles of practitioners as CoSIDA rebrands the profession as being comprised of “strategic communicators for college athletics.”
