Your alma mater is competing in a marquee rivalry game, and you’re excited about hopping online and doing some trash talking with your friends and colleagues. The game is untelevised. You log on your alma mater’s athletic website for an update, but the game is not live streamed and there are no live stats. No updates on the designated university Facebook or Twitter account, and no Instagram or Snapchat account to speak of, and no hashtag or keyword searches by which you can search other fellow users. You not only miss the opportunity to trash talk and engage, but you head to bed that evening with nary an update to be found, not even on the ESPN crawl.
If you ask the question “who’s winning?” and routinely cannot answer the question, allow me to answer it. Your team is not winning.
Low resources translate into the vast majority of problems that create a massive opportunity deficit for HBCU sports fans — small sports information departments (SID) and marketing/external relations staffs. They are often one-person staffs that simply cannot create sufficient content to satisfy the desires of adamant sports fans; inexperienced or inadequately trained SID and external relations officials who do not know how to (or that they should) produce robust and thematically organized content or engage and cultivate available traditional media resources; and cash-strapped budgets that athletic directors must increasingly dedicate to compliance and academic support, eliminating discretionary investment in external relations.
As a result, HBCU athletic programs tend to have the following characteristics in common:
Ultimately, the consequences are dire and more than trivial, and not just for alumni, donors and supporters. As we are in the midst of March Madness, proponents of the link between athletic success and enrollment growth often speak of the “Flutie effect,” or a phenomenon of educational sociology scholars use to track and predict exponential growth in admissions applications due to the prominent success of collegiate athletic programs.
The equation is simple: prominent success in revenue-generating sports elevates the institutional profile into the national media, exposing awareness and promoting investigation among prospective students. Tied to the enrollment growth that Boston College experienced in the wake of their football program’s success (in particular, an upset of national powerhouse and defending champion Miami in a 1984 contest), scholars observed the phenomenon at institutions that did not have national recruiting profiles before their athletic success on national television (think Gonzaga and George Mason in men’s basketball; California State University, Fullerton and Wichita State in baseball; and Boise State University and Marshall in college football).
