BSU Athletics: Athletic Reach

At the collegiate level, sports carry a significant identity and culture for universities, faculty, students, and alums. At Ball State University, they don’t do a great job promoting sports for future students and current students to explore and get into the culture. Prioritizing this reach for the university (students, faculty, alums, etc.) can have a significant impact on the university's culture.

At the collegiate level, sports carry a significant identity and culture for universities, faculty, students, and alums. At Ball State University, they don’t do a great job promoting sports for future students and current students to explore and get into the culture. Prioritizing this reach for the university (students, faculty, alums, etc.) can have a significant impact on the university's culture.

As stated, Ball State University Athletics doesn’t do a great job of reaching out and informing students and faculty about events and games. When viewing the university’s website, either from the student's perspective or a parent's perspective, it doesn’t provide a hyperlink or tab to make navigating to athletics easy. On the main page of the website, it shows information about life at Ball State, campus events, and statistics about the university’s faculty-to-student ratio, career placement, etc. The page never shows anything about the university's athletics. Looking at other university websites they usually have a module link to their athletics page. Changing the main hub on the page to visually show a tab for athletics could easily make a difference in the reach to faculty and students. As students ourselves, we often go to the Ball State University main page to navigate to library rooms, services, etc. For faculty it is the same, the main page for the university gets a lot of traffic and could be a perfect solution to promote information about athletics. Another thing that could be good for promoting ball state athletics is a social media account that covers all athletics. This platform could provide information about athletic campus events, game days for different sports, coverages on sports, media pictures, updates, etc. Other Instagram pages like Barstool and the other specific sports pages get a lot of attention and clicks because of the following base. If there were to be a general page providing the various information provided it would be ideal for some users to follow to keep up with up-to-date topics. This reach to the student body and faculty is an important element to engage the campus culture as a whole. Athletics for universities hold a huge weight for exemplifying school spirit and really bringing a campus together. Another way the athletic department and the college could reach students better is through events at other games. Giving real time updates on other sports while at a game would interest the crowd to look into other sports even if they only pay attention to one sport they may have the urge to go watch another team play. Including fans during breaks of games such as: timeouts, halftime, etc. is a really engaging way to make fans feel included at the events making them want to attend for the opportunity to win something or be acknowledged. Another thing the athletic department is doing to change this and get more reach to the student body is bringing in the freshman class and introducing them to the various sports teams and band members. This is something the athletic department is doing to have a better turnout at different events, this simple engagement between the student-athletes and students helped bring more people to games. The interaction isn’t much but just enough to evoke students to show out and be involved in campus life and athletics. There are many different ways for Ball State Athletics to reach these audiences that are targeted from website redeveloping, social media, engagement, and many other options. These ideas need to be implemented to get the results the campus culture is looking for and needs.

Ideas to progressively help athletic reach:

• Redesign the main page: add different hyperlinks for the athletic department for students to have easy access to information about events and games.

• Social media coverage: media pages like barstool, sports pages, etc. are used frequently amongst students to look for information and other media posts. Having a main athletic page for whole department would be a great idea to accomplish this reach

• In game sports updates: live updates of other upcoming events and information about athletics during live games.

• Game engagement: at events having different media that engages the audience throughout the game. The idea is to have prizes for students to win, hopefully having a greater turnout than usual.

• New student and Student-athlete engagement: introducing the various sports teams to the incoming freshmen to give them a sense of cultural identity.