Post #4

Post #4

Being an athlete, I feel it is necessary to touch on media and how it interacts with sports. I am a pole vaulter for the University of Arkansas (that is an event in track and field) and although women's vault is not nearly as followed and supported as something like football or baseball, the media and student body still pays attention to anyone on campus who is an athlete. They always say "WOW you're an athlete here?! That is awesome!!" They understand that it takes some serious athletic ability to be an athlete at a  division one university. Why is this? Why do they think it is so "cool" to be an athlete too? If you think about it, people don't say "WOW THAT IS SO COOL" to people who perfect the world of academics...why? I believe it is because the media in general promotes the image of an athlete. Although someone who is top of their class and very smart may be respected, people do not want to know what they get on every test, quiz, and project. With a football game, people want to know what happened in every single play, who had the ball, what happened every minute. The difference is the positive connotations associated with being an athlete. They supposedly make a lot of money, have a lot of fans and friends, are popular, are athletic and therefor physically fit and attractive, the list goes on and on. Media coverage of sports is HUGE. From NFL to NHL to the Olympics etc etc etc...everyone wants to watch the sports and our media can now provide to us a way to watch it live instantly. As an athlete, we are under certain pressures. If a player/athlete is really good, and in the spot light, that spot light can not only shine light on the amazing things the person accomplishes but anything negative they do as well. College students who are not athletes can get a DWI on a Saturday night and the people who may know about it are friends, parents, and any scholarship providers possibly...but if a star football player gets a DWI it is newsworthy material and everyone knows about it! As a track athlete, I have been interviewed a lot, my name has been in many articles, my picture, accomplishments and name are on the Arkansas website for track and field, the list goes on. Athletes are easy people to find because of stats being posted and information about them being on the internet. I know that this type of coverage is positive for a school. They want to promote the names of their best athletes. It is also positive for me in the future when I go to get a job... having been an athlete at UA will most likely give me a lot of awesome credentials to write on my resume. But there are definitely down sides to being easy to find. This world has become very scary in this way....pretty much anyone who wants to know my name can just google a few things like "pole vault" or "university of arkansas" or "track" and I could pop up. Especially for females, this can be scary. It makes the job of creepy people easier. (Yes, I am talking about stalkers.) Although I have never been personally affected in this way, it is a thought that causions me greatly. So, although the high media coverage of sports is wonderful, and it promotes the school and brings in money, it also gives us athletes more reason to make every facebook page, twitter account, etc a "private" account...it is just one less way for someone to watch our lives from a distance without us knowing.

This thought came into my mind because today I was looking up stats of many track athletes (simply trying to stay on top of my track knowledge and what kind of competition I have this year). I probably spent about an hour or so on my laptop reading articles on runnerspace.com, checking out dyestat, and reading more articles on getinthetrailer.com (a close friend of mine owns getinthetrailer.com. He is a very talented writer). Other media experiences of today have been listening to music. I have discovered a new album called "The Goat Rodeo Sessions" and it is a fascinating mixture of classical, blue grass, and some other sound I simply cannot place. This music communicates with me in an amazing way. From now on, I will listen to these songs (my favorite being "Here in Heaven") whenever I need to escape the cluttered and crazy world and experience the perfect fluidity and beauty of a cello, violin, mandolin  some other string instruments and soothing voices.