Sports Communication: What Are We Headed For?

As The Sports Nut, I have noticed incredible changes in sport communication in the quarter century that I have watched(and been sickly obsessed with) sport.  Sports used to be an entity that we were only subjected to if we opened up the sports page or scouted out a game to watch on TV or listen to on the radio.  Now, us sports fans are thankfully able to have our very own sports worlds as a major component of our lives. 

It has been noted that my life is geared towards sports.  In fact, I am watching Illinois State and Southern Illinois on the Comcast Center Channel as they play in the first round of the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament.  As I am doing that, I am keeping close tabs on my ipod touch next to me as to what is going on in the other college games around the country.  In this way, I am able to flip to them during every commercial or for the ends of every close game.  I am also following the battle of Florida(Orlando vs. Miami in the NBA) on my iPad's live game stats and will start flipping to it more as it gets to later in the game.  Just another day in the life of the Sportsnut!  Yet this represents something far greater.  It stands for what us sports fans are able to do when it comes to following sports.  I am sitting here able to watch and follow all of these games and will watch recaps of them later on Sportscenter and read summaries on ESPN.com.  And other people who obsess over sport and have the same lack of balance in their lives are able to do the exact same thing!

Sports are all around us no matter where we go.  We can watch games on 100 different channels, we can check scores or watch games on our blackberries, we can order sports packages on satellite or even order NBA League Pass Mobile on our iPods and IPads(I have it on both and it is amazing).  We can read about our favorite sports, teams, and players in dozens of magazines. We can get text updates on phones or watch every game of the NCAA tournament on our computers when our bosses are not looking...that is if we do not just take 2 personal days and go to a combined 12 first and second round tournament games bouncing back and forth between 2 sites during those first 4 days of  the tournament like one person I know...me (wait, why am I single again???)

Red Sox Nation, are you tired of reading about Alex Rodriguez? You no longer have to.  Just read about your teams.

There are new concepts cropping up, such as NFL Redzone and ESPN Goal Line.  These channels air all day on Sunday and Saturday, respectively, and bounce back and forth between all of the live games.  Therefore the viewer is spoon fed every key play live without having to pick up a remote.  We can purchase game tickets on our phones and will soon be able to have a bar code scanned from our phones in place of having to have any form of ticket on us.  ESPN.com has also created separate websites(ie. ESPN Dallas or ESPN New York) for fans so that they can still get all of the national articles on their teams, but without having to filter through ESPN.com itself.

Pretty impressive how far sport communication has come and how much sport is around us, huh?  And most of this has just happened in the past 25 years.  It would be naive to think that there not will not be many more significant jumps in sport communication over the next 25.

Any sports fans used to seeing their TVs look like this?

I think that sports will be much more accessible to us when we are on the go.  Sure we have satellite radio in our cars, radio, live game stats and some live games to watch on our phones.  However, I think we will soon start to see where every sports network broadcasts all of their programming to the point where we can watch all of it on our phones.  We already have nfl redzone, NBA league pass mobile, and college mobile sports, etc. on our phones, so we are clearly headed in the direction where EVERYTHING sport wise will be available on our phones.

I also foresee many more sponsorships as sport communication becomes more and more lucrative.  We are beginning to see previews for NBA games and movies intertwined in the same commercials!  This will be a lot more prevalent going forward and we will probably experience sponsorship commercials tied into game previews much in the way that movies are beginning to. 

Journalism coverage of sport will be all that more extensive.  There will be more interviews, and juicier details/more stories about the lives of athletes. 

TV viewing will be more enhanced as fans will be able to select interviews or clips right off of the TV screen.  There will be much more interaction with players as chat rooms, social networks, etc. become more prevalent.

These are just a few of the things that I think we can safely say we will see in the next few years, but I am sure that there will be many more innovations in the world of sport communication that we are not now aware are even possible.  As the Sports Nut, I am more than a little excited at what is in store for us fans.  Heck, players might even come out of our TVs and into our living rooms.  Oh wait, turn on ESPN3D...they already are.

Baltimore Maryland: In Desparate Need of a Skatepark!

Baltimore's only current skatepark, located in Carroll Park

Baltimore, Maryland needs another skatepark.  Currently, the city has one 10,000 square foot park to accommodate roughly 30,000 skaters in the city.  Many of the other smaller cities in Maryland have adequate skateparks, but the state's biggest city is lagging behind.  This is why Baltimore Maryland is a very deserving candidate for the Tony Hawk Grant.



 The group that would be most suited to apply for the Tony Hawk Grant would be a group called the Skatepark of Baltimore.  It is a group of over 100 volunteers who are rallying around the need to build a large skating park in Baltimore.  As there are skaters, community activists, and skateboard enthusiasts in the group, the Skatepark of Baltimore is well qualified to submit the grant for the Tony Hawk Grant.

Aside from having about 30,000 skaters, Baltimore is a city with a lot of youths growing up in poverty who would benefit from another skating park.  The median household income in the city of Baltimore is slightly over $30,000.  There are also a large number of at risk youths Baltimore who could use another place to go to do something fun and sociable instead of being put in potentially violent or troublesome situations.

Proposed location for a new skatepark

Currently, the only skating park in Baltimore is located in Carroll Park and is 10,000 sq feet.  The Skatepark of Baltimore is proposing to open a skatepark in Roosevelt Park in Hamden.  The best location for this would be at the intersection of W 36th and Falls Rd.  The new proposed park would be about 5.2 miles from the existing skating park at Carroll Park.  Therefore it would still be in the heart of the city, but would be spread out enough so that there would be a park in relatively close proximity to most of the cities skaters.

The new park would be 11,000 sq feet and should contain a combination of the following: half pipes, quarter pipes, handrails, vertical ramps, pyramids, banked ramps, full pipes, pools, bowls, snake runs, and stairsets.