By Wright Thompson
"@JManziel2: Bullshit like tonight is a reason why I can't wait to leave college station...whenever it may be
Four days after the tweet, Johnny Manziel did what many boys do when they're in trouble. He went home." (Published in ESPN The Magazine on July 30, 2013)

By Mina Kimes
"Every time the Houston Texans play at home, DeAndre Hopkins' mother, Sabrina Greenlee, sits in the same spot in the end zone, close enough to the field to hear the ball smack against the turf...When it's time for the home team to run through the gate, a massive flamethrower erupts nearby. Greenlee recoils, and her eyes, which are the same cloudy shade of white as an overcast sky, glisten from the heat. A few minutes later, Hopkins emerges from the tunnel -- he's always the last player on offense to come out, Greenlee explains -- and she smiles. She can't see her son, but she knows he's there." (Published on ESPN.com on Oct. 16, 2019)

By Tyler Kepner and James Wagner
"The pioneering baseball executive proved herself — over and over — for three decades. Several of her peers say they can’t think of a more qualified first-time general manager.' (Published in The New York Times on 11/18/2020)

By Mike Wilson
"For a couple of days in early January, Frank Miller wandered around his house holding a baseball, practicing the grips for a slider, curve and cutter. He’d read a book about pitching and now he was obsessed.He needed to play catch, stat. So his wife, Alice, more adept at social media, posted a note on Nextdoor, the neighborhood app."
(Published in The New York Times on 1/16/2021.)

By Emma Baccellieri
"Maybelle Blair, a 93-year-old former player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, is raising money to open a center honoring women and girls in baseball." (Published by Sports Illustrated on 1/11/2021.)

By Tess DeMeyer
"Beyond the drama and personality-driven narratives of the Netflix documentary series “Cheer,” this even-handed examination points out the discrepancies between how the NCAA treats college cheerleaders and athletes on other sports teams. It’s a story of possibilities. If a cheerleader squad can promote products on Instagram, why can’t a safety on the football team or a libero on the volleyball squad?" (Published in The New York Times on 11/29/2020.)

By Melvin L. Williams and Matthew J. Cotton
The current research examined LaVar Ball’s usage of sports media to build an agenda for the press coverage of his sons—Lonzo, LiAngelo, and LaMelo Ball. Specifically, this research conducted a critical discourse analysis of 50 televised interviews on CBS Sports, CNN, ESPN, and Fox Sports to determine if LaVar’s media messages (a) incorporated Lang and Lang’s (1983) six-step process of agenda building, (b) discussed inequities facing Black athletes in sports, and (c) offered a positive counterstereotype to historic media representations of Black fathers. The analysis determined that LaVar followed all six steps of Lang and Lang’s agenda-building model in his promotions of the Ball brothers and Big Baller Brand. In addition to endorsing his sons, LaVar addressed class inequities facing Black athletes in amateur and professional sports and refuted deadbeat-dad stereotypes facing Black fathers. Ultimately, this study revealed how LaVar used agenda-building tactics to engage prominent media outlets and formally introduce the Ball brothers to a global audience.

By Kirsti Tredway
Serena Williams is the most accomplished tennis player in the open era of professional tennis. She is also a Black woman which figures prominently in how she is (mis)understood in tennis. Using intersectionality as an interpretive framework, we aim to show how Serena fits within the social structure of tennis which was created within the white, upper-class social milieu. Within the lineage from this historic milieu, Serena is sometimes perceived to be violent; however, that perception highlights the ways in which Serena is positioned differently in this setting than her counterparts. Her outbursts are not more egregious than those of other players; however, Serena’s performance of blackness disrupts the expected tennis imaginary and attaches to her the extra imaginings of those features attached to blackness such as urban mannerisms, lack of respect for authority, and violence, which unjustly add extra weight for Serena to bear.

By Jennifer L. Harker, Jonathan A. Jensen:
The purpose of this research is to extend current knowledge regarding rivalry communication among sport consumers to better understand how rivals behave with one another when they communicate.
Design/methodology/approach: This national survey of US sport consumers used a novel approach to explore whether and with whom rivals discuss National Football League (NFL) game outcomes. The survey captured both uniplex and multiplex data by asking respondents to name rival discussants with whom they had recently interacted, and the fan behaviors they exchanged with those named rival discussants.
Findings: Through use of this novel data collection approach, new findings were uncovered related to blasting, glory out of reflective failure, schadenfreude and the influence of team identification on the exchange of rivalry fan behaviors. The results of the uniplex and multiplex data analyses uniquely showcase the ways in which social identity theory combines with team identification to enact rivalry behavior.
Originality/value: This research is the first to precisely dichotomize the psychological antecedents from the communicated behavior between rival fans. Results reveal the precise ways in which team identification influences discordant communication between rival fans, which differs from past research in an interesting new way.

By Dunja Antunovic :
In April 2016, a US-based independent sport media organization Just Not Sports launched #MoreThanMean, a digital media campaign to raise awareness about online harassment of women in sports journalism. The video quickly reached 3.7 million views and generated widespread coverage in mainstream news media, sports media, and online-only outlets. Using the #MoreThanMean campaign as a case study, this study assesses how discourses circulate in the sports media environment and, in particular, how feminist messages travel as the content moves from social media to mass media. This study engages with post-feminism in order to examine how various producers of media content position online harassment and sexism in sport and society. While the campaign positioned online harassment as gendered workplace discrimination, the mainstream and sports media coverage typically centralized men in the discussion. Feminist perspectives were constrained to platforms with a progressive, women-centered, and/or explicitly feminist take. Implications for digital feminist activism in the context of sport are discussed.

By Guy Harrison, Ann Pegoraro, Miles Romney and Kevin Hull:
On September 11, 2017, ESPN’s Jemele Hill tweeted that United States President Donald Trump was a “white supremacist.” Online reaction was swift and divided. The purpose of this study was to analyze how people were discussing the incident on Facebook using the theoretical lens of framing. Results demonstrate that discussions devolved into stereotypical tropes and uncivil discourse. Ultimately, Hill’s race and gender became as much of a topic of contention as did her comments about Trump. This finding suggests that many Facebook users are willing and able to use an intersectional approach to discussing the incident.