fshorr's blog

“My life is mine.”

Dr. Kyoung-yim Kim’s sister wrote these words on a piece of paper when she left home at a young age to pursue her dream of becoming a professional golfer…a dream her father strongly opposed.

As I reflected on our conversation at last week’s seminar about whether or not an athlete has social responsibilities to uphold and as I read Professor Shorr’s blog post, I couldn’t help but think about the irony embedded in that powerful note.

What about these words do I find so contradictory?

Well, we can start by going all the way back to our first seminar to find the answer.

RJ Hunter and Jordan Mickey are not household names by any means, but these Celtics rookies are well versed in media training and well aware of what their sports organization wants them to say and how it expects them to act. There’s certain procedures players are expected to follow when it comes to answering questions in press conferences and posting opinions on social media.

As Dr. Kim implied, both college and professional athletes are under “external corporate power.” So, how much of a professional athlete’s life is truly his/her own? Not much, I’ve come to realize.

From the day Mickey stepped onto LSU’s campus until the moment he graduated, he received media training…and the lesson plan hasn’t changed since he’s joined the NBA. “They [coaches, teams, media departments] all say the same things, “Put the team before yourself. Always praise coaches, school, whatever organization you’re under at that time,” Mickey said.

If two NBA rookies—players who don’t have mega-million dollar marketing sponsorships—seemingly have lives that are very little their “own,” this issue only gets much worse for higher-profile athletes.

Take Lebron James, for instance. He earns approximately 42 million dollars a year from endorsements (source: Forbes). But with great power, athletic talent, and marketability comes great responsibility and expectations, at the expense of the athlete’s true independence. That’s just the way it goes. There are always sacrifices involved, and as is the case of many professional athletes, their sacrifices happen to be much greater due to the heavily scrutinized position society puts them in.

Countless athletes, like Dr. Kim’s sister, make it to the professional level of their sport and are expected to wear certain outfits, endorse specific brands, and—as we saw with Hunter and Mickey—say certain things.

“At the end of the day it’s an illusion,” Zuri Burry said. Media coverage and hype surrounding certain athletes automatically thrusts them into the spotlight. “Because of the hype behind Lebron James that automatically makes him a role model…I don’t want to agree with that.”

Neither do I. Yet athletes have social responsibilities, whether they like it or not.

It may be an illusion, but it’s an illusion we must accept as reality. It is impossible—and personally I feel it is unethical—to argue that a player’s on field performance can be viewed separately from his/her off-the-field endeavors.

However, the conversation about social responsibility doesn’t just pertain to the athletes. The recent controversy surrounding the Moran-Farrell affair that Professor Shorr alluded to in his blog adds a whole new element to last week’s seminar and brings up another crucial point: It’s not just athletes who are thrust into the spotlight and have certain responsibilities to uphold as public figures. Sports reporters do, too.
Like the athletes they cover, sports reporters must make sacrifices. In a Boston Globe article published yesterday—“Why the relationship between John Farrell, reporter matters”—Red Sox beat reporter and former seminar guest Jen McCaffrey responded to the controversy by saying, “It’s not just about two people having a relationship. It’s a professional environment.”

Sorry, Moran and Farrell, I don’t care if you’re in love. A journalist’s job is to be objective, not to “protect relationships,” as Zuri Burry put it, since doing so prevents reporters from “examining an issue as critically as possible.”

Moran and Farrell can argue all they want about how their personal lives are their own, but my only response to them is this: It ain’t that easy.

I’m breaking away from Andrew and Judy this week because I have a lot of thoughts that I think can be better expressed in written form. Now that I’ve had time to process my thoughts a little better, I wanted to focus specifically on this idea of a “role model” that we discussed with Zuri Berry and Kyoung-Yim Kim. I stumbled over my words a bit in class, saying that athletes’ off-field actions don’t, or shouldn’t, matter to me, as long as they don’t impact their on-field performance. I was told that was a pretty low standard for someone, and Aaron Hernandez was brought up as an example.

So I guess, apparently, not murdering someone makes you a good role model. If we’re talking about low standards…that’s probably a better example. There’s a big difference between a “bad role model” and then a straight-up criminal.

But here’s what I really want to get at: Often our notions of what constitutes a “good role model” are very, very racialized. Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady are good role models (hint: white). Cam Newton is a bad role model (hint: black). We admire Russell Wilson, though, because, while black, is very Christian, very “white-acting” for all intents and purposes, and visits the Seattle Children’s Hospital pretty much every day of the week. He’s a Jesus-loving, chaste, charitable guy, so we’re allowed to admire him.

We expect our athletes to be responsible, good citizens — but through a very, very narrow, white-washed, sometimes classist definition of what constitutes a good citizen. It’s really a whole lot more complicated than that. They are adults, capable of making decisions on their own, but they’re placed in a harsh spotlight, and every move they make is up for critique. Our notion of a bad role model is someone who speaks his or her mind, or is vocal, sometimes overconfident, goes out and drinks…all things that basically all adults do, but that get blown out of proportion when an athlete does them.

I understand why teams want athletes to maintain a good, charitable image, from a marketing sense. But here’s the main thing: We can admire good deeds from athletes outside of the playing arena, but we shouldn’t expect them all to be the same way. At the end of the day, athletes don’t owe us as fans anything besides a good athletic performance, and it’s irresponsible and demeaning to suggest otherwise.

As for this whole Jess Moran debacle — I’ve been battling with this a bit, but ultimately have a bad feeling about how it’s being handled in the media. I don’t think there’s any question that dating a source is off the table as long as you’re reporting on that source. But the media has very much pounced on it as an opportunity to turn women against other women, which is very, very problematic. I’ve battled specifically with Chad Finn’s piece (https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2016/03/10/media/WcEIMAT4F8pRdcEFyVlHgI/story.html) where he talked to other women who cover the Red Sox, including previous guest Jen McCaffrey, about the irresponsible nature of Moran’s actions.

The piece almost came across as women needing to validate that they would NEVER do such a thing, sort of a high-and-mighty tone that had a sense of “well, I’m better than SOME people.” It just seemed very aggressive, very attacking, and very unnecessary. Respect of women isn’t achieved by women bringing other women down.

Because I’ve been nothing but perfectly candid thus far, I’ll admit it: I found this seminar to be the most awkward by far.

Perhaps it was the absurd heat in the room, but more likely it was the conversation which caused me too frequently, and unnecessarily, sip my water.

From my perch in the front row, I shifted in my seat to glance back, and as Professor Shorr noted, noticed the room’s notable lack of diversity.

Dr. Kyoung-yim Kim and Zuri Berry in particular, spoke at length about the courage it requires to delve into issues surrounding race with someone of a different one.

Obviously, I was not as brave or prepared as I believed myself to be.

Perhaps this was why I gravitated to the emerging conversation about athletes as role models.

After listening to seminar discussion, and reading through my peers’ comments, it seems to me that I fall furthest along the spectrum; I firmly believe that athletes are, unequivocally, role models. Period.

Berry said that the notion that athletes have social responsibility is an “illusion.” Fair. Fine. But as I discussed with him after the seminar’s end, accepting social responsibility and acting as a role model are very different things. Taking an active stance, beginning a movement, discussing challenging, often politically charged issues – that is social responsibility. Being a good role model? That, to me, is as simple as being a mature, responsible, kind human being.

Citing LeBron James as an example, Berry went on to propose that “hype” emphasizes this responsibility. He criticized James’ hesitance to respond to the Tamir Rice situation after so publicly responding to other controversial situation-led movements and conversations like it. It was difficult for me, unabashedly a tremendous fan, to disagree.

But James as a role model is a tremendous success. Married to his high school sweetheart, father of three, caring son… Many disapprove of career decisions or the influence he wields; he isn’t perfect. And perfect a role model need not be.

As my classmate Sarah Kirkpatrick addressed, a lack of felony behavior is a pretty low standard. My own definition of a good role model extends well beyond avoiding criminal charges, but it doesn’t demand flawlessness. It doesn’t demand conformity. It doesn’t demand changing or diminishing personality. Athletes are human, after all.

And while I am sympathetic to the fact that, as high-profile individuals, every less-desirable thing they do is sensationalized and scrutinized, I refuse to “contextualize away” (to borrow a term from Berry) any poor decision-making. It simply isn’t OK that Johnny Manziel has irresponsibly squandered his NFL opportunity. Parents wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior from their college-age kid, and Browns fans shouldn’t tolerate it from the young man they counted on to improve their team.
Because at the end of the day, the only reason athletes earn rich salaries and are afforded the ability to play the game they love for a luxurious lifestyle is because of fans.

Every single individual who purchases a jersey or a pair of sneakers or shows up with season tickets has a vested interest in the players, and consequently, the players themselves must recognize that they are, responsible to those fans – as people and players.

Just examine the results Dr. Kim relayed. Americans absorbed more views of the players they love simply standing around conversing during Super Bowl 2014 than anything else. The domestic audience is already used to seeing athletes as more than just sports talent. Why is it then a surprise that they should expect something from them beyond that?

Berry, however, as previously discussed, firmly holds the opposite view. He expressed not just reluctance but staunch disagreement with “placing athletes on a pedestal.” He said he didn’t want his son to idolize athletes. He told me later that his own mother didn’t allow him to do so either, barring him from wearing any jerseys.

Suddenly, I had wandered firmly into race territory.

It occurred to me that, as Kirkpatrick wrote, many commonly considered ideal athlete role models are white. My own lead-in to the conversation was the blonde-and-blue-eyed, Wisconsin-born J.J. Watt. But Berry’s opposition to player admiration goes beyond the narrow standards.

In our discussion, he explained how his mother attempted to turn his attention to people of different occupations – lawyers, doctors… in short, as Berry attested, the kind of careers that young, black men in his community didn’t dream of becoming. They all, however, dreamed of being pro players.

It’s a revelation I am unsure of what to do with. Clearly,
Berry’s refusal to accept athletes as role models stems from the fact that the practice has become racially significant. It’s no secret that many diverse, underprivileged youth (from the streets of Chicago or the Domincan Republic) have utilized sports to elevate their socioeconomic status, creating a better life for themselves and their families. It seems to me that Berry wishes to steer his son away from those stereotypical aspirations.

Obviously, this unfair racial expectation has influenced his perception on the issue of player role models, but, just as obviously, his attitude is not unfounded. But it also seems to me that Berry’s rationale is a personal one. He disagrees with the idolization of pros because he doesn’t want his son to subscribe to a discriminatory idea – that his goals as a black child should include being a NBA player.

But just because Berry doesn’t want his own child taking those sort of cues from athletes doesn’t mean that other children won’t look to them, with or without their parents’ consent, not just for career aspirations, but also to decide how to act. Berry is entitled to steer his son away (and his reasons for doing so have stirred an intrigue that may very well coax me into one of those aforementioned uncomfortable conversations), but for the sake of all others, players should still be held to certain standards. Although many would like to believe that firm parenting will counteract any negative influences, that simply isn’t how psychology and media interact. Kids and adolescents of all ages and races are absorbing how their favorite players behave. As fans contributing to each athlete’s popularity, they’re owed some level of respect – a good example.

And seeing as how being a good role model is simply being a good, responsible human being, is holding that expectation really, therefore, so much to ask?

The recent panel regarding any sort of minority identifier, but particularly sexism and racism, in sports hit particularly home for me as a female who has been in sports all her life. And at the same time it was made even more acute by the widely-covered current events involving Erin Andrews.

As a female athlete for almost my entire life I must admit I have rarely encountered moments where I felt that my sex and my involvement in sports ever clashed or caused incident. In most of my experience if you played a sport, whether female or male, you were an athlete and that was it. I know that this may not be the experience for everyone and I can see how being part of a more male dominate sport such as hockey or football would drastically have changed my experience.

Still the way I see any athlete is as a competitor and a player. Man or woman never was a distinction I made. Did I swim only against girls? And play soccer on a woman’s team? Yes. My mother made me play on a boy’s team until I could play competitively to “toughen me up” so I suppose that is a social construct there but most likely a conversation for another time.

But now I am now longer an athlete, however much I would like to hold on to those glory days. Now, I am a fan and female trying to make a profession in the world of sports. And now, my perception as a female in the sports business has already been littered with demeaning and sexist incidents for the short time I have been apart of it. Even something as little as a fellow classmate in a different class making a comment to my friends and I about how we do not know anything about sports because we are woman, changes my few quickly.

The recent suit filed and won by Erin Andrews is an example under a huge microscope and at the utmost professional level. I cannot pretend to completely relate to her experiences but it is not hard to take her trials with sexism in the sports world and water it down to a smaller degree and make it relevant in my life. In the recent New York Time’s piece, The Dangers of Being a Female Sportscaster, it is demonstrated how it may not be possible to escape the sexism in any way if you are female in the sports industry.

Dr.Kyoung-yim Kim’s opinion on how we can change this fact was rather dismal. In her studies, she has found that the sports culture against women is an excellent way to exemplify the problems. But that it is just a mirror for our general culture. And our general culture will have to completely change (commercialism, sexism, etc.) in order for the sexist nature of the sports industry to even have a chance. I think that this was an important notion. But I would hope that female athletes like myself who have had a positive experience in sports can try and change this systematic problem, even if it would be a small drop in a giant ocean.

“After the jury’s decision, Ms. Andrews was thankful for the encouragement she said she had received from other victims of harassment, and she suggested the case’s outcome would improve safety.

“I’ve been honored by all the support from victims around the world,” she said on Twitter. “Their outreach has helped me be able to stand up and hold accountable those whose job it is to protect everyone’s safety, security and privacy.””

Let us hope that Erin Andrews sad experience and the others mentioned in this piece will also help spark change.

Unfortunately, I was not able to make this seminar but to me it seems like it could have been a great debate. The issue of if an athlete should be a role model or not, seemed to be one of the main topics. And the fact that our speakers said that they shouldn’t be, is shocking to me. In fourteen games, one of the greatest basketball players to ever touch the court will play his last NBA game ever. This man is Kobe Bryant. I bring him up because he is the reason that half the world plays basketball today. As Kobe plays his final games of his career, every press conference continues to consist of the words “I looked up to him,” from players of the opposing team. The day after Kobe announced his retirement the whole league ran to hear what Lebron James had to say. “I mean, in high school I wore a nappy-ass Afro because of Kobe Bryant,” James said. “Because he wore it. I wanted to be just like him, man.” Kobe was the role model for Lebron and so many others. Many people say Lebron has already surpassed Kobe but Kobe was part of the reason for Lebron as Michael Jordan was part of the reason for Kobe (definitely a much bigger part, I mean look at the similarity in their moves). They were each others role models.

If you look at the amount of people that continue to look up to these three it is truly amazing. Jordan had a movie called “Like Mike,” because everyone wanted to be just like him. And I can’t even count the amount of times I had yelled “Kobe” when I was shooting around on the court’s growing up. Today everyone probably yells “Curry” but that’s it’s exactly what this is about. This is a trend that has continued from generation to generation and will continue to do so. I mean look what Steph Curry has been able to do to the whole game alone. This past weekend I went to the MIT Sloan Conference and one of the panels was all about “The Curry Landscape.” The speaker described the effect Curry has made on the game and how it has become a three point shooting game because of him. Shane Battier, a retired NBA Champion, talked about how his seven year old son is pulling up three feet behind the line already. These athletes have become role models in so many people’s eyes and I can’t see how you wouldn’t want them to be role models. They do such a great job of inspiring and helping people fulfill their dream and it does not always only have to do with the game itself.

Like Kobe, Allen Iverson was another great that played the game; however, he was a role model to players in a different way. Everyone wanted to learn his pick and roll game and have his killer crossover but there was more to it than that. Iverson’s cornrows, tattooed body, and shooting sleeves were things that the league had never seen before. Now go ahead and take a look at the league today, it’s everywhere. If Allen Iverson had the tattoos and the cornrows, others were going to get them to. He was admired and a role model for so many which leads to the point that athletes need to be role models. It may be frowned upon to have that kind of style but it brings something new to the game and shows what kind of impact these athletes can have. They inspire others to try out new things and they bring a new style of play to the game.

I guess what I am getting at is that athletes should be responsible for being role models because this is the way they became who they are. They had their own role models that they wanted to be just like so shouldn’t they do the same thing for others that look up to them? They looked up to others who gave them the aspirations to play like Mike or dress like Iverson. Most athletes had someone they looked up to in order to reach their success so they should have the responsibility to be that someone for someone else. They need to pay it forward.

However, like Zuri mentioned, there are athletes like Aaron Hernandez, an example of an athlete that isn’t responsible for being a role model because he committed murder. I believe that Zuri has a point here but if you take away the whole murder case then people start to see him as a role model again. In this world not everything is perfect and people make mistakes so of course you are going to have some Aaron Hernandez’s. That doesn’t take away the fact he should have the responsibility to be a role model and some will argue that he was a good one before this news came about. In my mind athletes should have a responsibility to be role models because without them there would not be a future. The future athletes would not know what to strive for and their would be no “I wanna be like Mike,” and isn’t being a role model half the reason to play the game? There are so many athletes talk about how they want to change the image of their race or gender but how can they do that without being role models for the future?

The next point I want to discuss is “my life is mine.” Reading through the comments it seems that many others believe that professional athletes’ lives aren’t really theirs. I completely understand where everyone is going with this but I think there’s more to it than my classmates think. There’s always going to be things that athletes need to say but it is still their choice on whether they want to say it or not. Most athletes will always credit their teammates before themselves but why is it automatically assumed that they are saying it because they are forced to? I know it sounds unimaginable but maybe the athlete is doing it because they actually do believe they couldn’t have done it without their teammates. There are definitely things that they need to say and times where they shouldn’t be bragging about what they just did but it doesn’t mean it’s always forced on them. I know Lebron James is an exception because he is the coach, general manager, and captain of the team but look at what he is tweeting out right now. “It’s this simple. U can’t accomplished the dream if everyone isn’t dreaming the same thing everyday. Nightmare follows,” read one of James’ last tweets. Obviously this was about the Cavaliers and I could only imagine how angry “the real gm,” David Griffin was about this. Lebron says what he wants and no one will got on him because he is Lebron but that is not the point. The point is that athletes can say what they want if they choose to. We have talked about the Marshawn Lynch speech over and over again in this class. “I am here so I won’t get fined.” Lynch is also a big name to live up to but it shows that these athletes can own their own lives if they want too.

I know it is hard to believe but we do not know what every athlete does every minute of the day even with all the media coverage today. I think one thing people like to assume is that if it’s not in the media then the athlete is not doing it but they shouldn’t think like that. At the MIT Sloan Conference this past weekend, Brian Scalabrine, 2008 NBA Champion, talked about how players were always going out to the club if they weren’t hopping on a plane right away for the next game. My point is that players do have their own choices to make and just because we don’t hear about the things they’re doing it doesn’t mean their not doing them. Obviously, there will always be things athletes have to do and say but I don’t think we should assume that the athlete has almost no control of their own lives. They have more freedom than some people think.

I wanted to be Nastia Liukin when I grew up. I wanted to be an elite gymnast. I wanted to go to the Olympics. I even wanted my parents to pretend they were retired Olympic gymnasts too, just like her parents!

That was until I met her.

Nastia, or as my coach used to call her “Nasty-a”, was a role model to me growing up. She had all of the athletic talent a young gymnast would dream of having. She got to travel all over the world doing the one thing she loved to do and she looked like she enjoyed every second of it.

But, I met Nastia when I was a sophomore in high school, long after my dreams of becoming an Olympic gymnast were over and realized that she wasn’t a good role model at all. She was rude to her fans and she pushed aside little girls that admired her in the way that I admired Carly Patterson in 2004. She was arrogant and she didn’t appreciate the young people who looked up to her.

From that day forward at the Visa Championships in 2010, I was no longer a fan of Nastias.

These thoughts came back into my mind as we sat in the room with Dr. Kyoung-yim Kim and Zuri Berry and talked about the possibility that maybe athletes aren’t supposed to be role models, but just people who are really good at sports, just like a person on an academic scholarship at a school is a person who is just really good at academics, as Dr. Kim pointed out.

She also says that it is “unfair” for athletes to perform socially expected behaviors just because they are highlighted in the world of sports. But, that makes me think of all of my training here at BU, where at the beginning of each year athletes sign contracts with the university saying we won’t do certain things non-athletes may be able to do and that we will hold ourselves to higher expectations as leaders and role models in our community.

Does this actually not make sense in a collegiate world where some of us are just playing a sport so that we can afford college? Instead of using our academic skill to get a scholarship, like others, we use our athletic skills to pay for school.

It put the world of being a role model into a new perspective for me. Am I able to still admire Nastia for her amazing feats in gymnastics even though I don’t necessarily agree with some of her personality traits and the way she portrays herself in public?

Or, is it time to recognize that people are just people. All people make mistakes and a common theme in our seminars have been talking about making mistakes and how much more common it is in journalism to make a mistake.

Are athletes and journalists like Jess Moran supposed to hold themselves to higher standards just because of the job title they hold?

I’m still on the fence about what side of this debate I’m on. I’ve always liked to think of sports stars as a person I’d like to be when I grew up and I worked hard and made certain choices in my life to be more like those athletes. Does that not make them a role model?

But now, supposedly sitting in the role model position as a student athlete here at BU, it does seem a little unfair that I would have to act “better” than another person receiving the same money I am from BU just because I play a sport instead of use academics to get by.

When Dr. Kim’s sister ran away from home, she left a note that said “my life is mine”.

I’m beginning to think that she ran away from one patriarchal father and ran into a whole society and corporation where every move she made was watched and critiqued, just because she was one heck of a golfer.

Our seminar with Kyoung-Yim Kim and Zuri reminded us that there are still mountains for us to overcome as a society when it comes to race and gender, even in sports. When we look through the scope of athletics, it’s easy for us to believe that we’ve completely broken the barriers of race and gender. Some of our most beloved pro athletes are black, and we have laws like Title IX that allow women similar opportunities to earn scholarships and play the sport they love at the college level. I think, though, both our guests showed us why we still aren’t all equal, even in the world of athletics.

Berry spoke a lot about race, and concluded the night by saying that it’s important that we all be courageous in having conversations about race, because dialogue is one of the most important starters in conquering issues about race.

I took a class freshman year called the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, which is no doubt the most powerful and eye-opening class I will ever take. I was just a little freshman that didn’t know a whole lot about the world around me, and, opposite to our seminar, I was the only white male in the class, a class of about 40 people. Our grade in the class was participation-based, so I had no choice but to be courageous, and voice my opinions, ideas, and misconceptions and race. I took this class two years ago, and to be honest, I had forgotten how important it is to talk about a topic as pervasive as race, especially when many of us don’t believe that racism exists anymore.

Berry gave us a great real-life example of how it does, especially in sports. If LeBron were to get a DUI, America would throw stones at him and call for his face to be taken off every billboard and for all of his endorsers to drop him. However, if Rob Lowe, a white comedian who is a fairly household name, got a DUI, we would all shrug and say, “Haha that’s just Rob being Rob.” And as Natalie pointed out, Maria Sharapova announced her failed drug test this week. Worldwide, she is one of the most polarizing and successful female athletes, but the media has given this news seemingly no attention. Many of Sharapova’s sponsors have announced they are dropping her, but there is seemingly no public outcry for parents and others that believe Sharapova has let down all the kids that look up to her.

As Kim explained to us, becoming a successful female athlete is no easy task. Gaining sponsorships as a Korean golfer just to compete at the highest level is impossible if the woman is not extremely conscious about how she presents herself in public. And by conscious, Kim means that the golfer needs to make sure she looks her best at all times, even when competing.

Similar to what Kim touched on, there are so few opportunities for women to pursue their dream of playing professional sports compared to men. Many women that want to pursue professional careers have to forgo college, and thus, whether or not their pro career is successful, they are often left without a degree once their career is over. Kim is working on a study now, in which she has found that most retired Korean female golfers have found success in broadcasting. I told her that in America, it seems that their most viable option is coaching, though I obviously don’t have the facts to back that up. Nevertheless, these are not going to be viable career options for all retired female athletes.

Institutional changes in regards to race and gender need to happen to give minorities the opportunities to succeed in the athletic world and beyond. We have come a long way in regards to this, but we still have a long way to go. And as Berry said, it takes courage to have conversations about race. And we need to continue to have them.

Before spring break we had Zuri Berry and Dr. Kyoung-yim Kim in class to pick their brains on Race and Gender in relation to the sports journalism field. After Kim explained a little bit of her sister’s backstory and briefly expressed her distaste for the sexualization of female athletes in the media, the conversation quickly curtailed away from the adverse topic and headed toward the role model debate in relation to professional athletes, which raised raised some strong opinions on both sides of the spectrum.

Especially at the professional level, I don’t see how we couldn’t expect athletes to assume the role of positive role models in their respective communities. Historically, sports have been used as outlets for kids that grow up in bad communities, and have had difficult family lives, and they indirectly find an idol in their favorite sport that helps them power through the difficult times in their lives and inspires them to be more, and do more with their lives.

Conversely, when professional athletes act out in negative ways, kids—being as impressionable as they are—become effected by those acts as well. Part of being an athlete is behaving like an outstanding member of the community—this notion has been ingrained in our society by enacting GPA minimums in high school and college sports, and additionally suspending players from play when they act out in school, or fall below the GPA requirement.

My stance remains that athletes should be expected to serve as positive role models as soon as they enter the lime light. That being said, I also think that the seminar shifted too quickly from talks about race, gender and biases that exists in the field, and toward the idea of athletes as role models—where we should have been talking race the whole time.

According to the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), newsrooms in this country haven’t seen much of a spike in percentages of their staff that are comprised of minority journalists—totaling 12.76% in 2014. The same study found that 63% of newsrooms had a woman among their top three editors—which is promising—but only 12% reported that one of their top three editors was a person of color. Obviously this is a problem, and a problem that is reflected in our very own community as pointed out during our seminar. Not one student in the class belongs to a minority group. Not one.

The big question is, obviously, how can we help change the race breakdown in the newsroom?

Berry thinks we start by talking about race, for as the silence of the class suggested, hasn’t been happening all too often on BU’s campus—a presumably forward thinking community of diverse students. I guess the Howard Thurman Center’s talks only reach so far in a university totaling 32,500 students.

One of the main problems, at least in my mind, is the seemingly obliviousness that the majority of the world has towards the underrepresented population issue—I wholeheartedly believe that our last class is the first time any of us noticed that we didn’t have any minority groups represented. That, to me, is the real problem.

Race has undoubtedly always been difficult for people to talk about, making if difficult to bring forth change, which was precisely Berry’s point. People need to start talking about it and then maybe that day, we will start seeing some shifts in the white dominant field.

Stats courtesy of http://asne.org/content.asp?pl=121&sl=15&contentid=415

If you love what you are doing, then it will show in your work. This was the on going theme of this week.

What may have been the most comforting statement of the night was when Chris Sedenka said, “You’ll never have a flawless broadcast.”

To me this resonated deeply. Personally, I am a perfectionist and the fear of messing up or making a mistake has always held be back from doing certain things. To hear both Chris and Jeff talk about mistakes being common and inevitable was a relief.

As a kid I distinctly remember going around my house and hearing the TV and the announcer screaming, “GOOOAL.” The enthusiasm and the excitement in their voices were enough to make me stop playing my game and run to the TV to watch replays.

When looking back, it was because of the way play-by-play would announce the game that taught me about sports. Sure, watching the sport helps, but if there was no announcing the rules and the history of sports would have been left out.

Chris and Jeff described their job as “telling a story with their voice.” Personally, I find it easier to convey my words through writing. But play-by-play people, tell a story in a matter of seconds with out even really fully processing what came out of their mouth before the next play is under way. It is second nature. To me that speaks for itself, they really are professionals at their craft.

Growing up or watching sports it is easy to take them play-by-play for granted. However, could you imagine watching a professional sport on TV and not have a voice narrating what was happening? Play-by-play brings the game to life, and makes it more relatable.

The main point of this seminar was, you have to love what you do. Play-by-play would be extremely challenging if you did not love it. I think in whatever you do, you have to enjoy what you are doing. One can’t fake passion or love of the game, you either have it or you don’t.