Student-Athletes and the Media

By: Carolyn Peck

Originally Published in: Winning Ways of Women Coaches

Provided by: Human Kinetics

Inviting the media into your sports program means they have access to the student-athletes. I highly recommend, before you allow media access, that there is value in media training for your student-athletes. You have to teach your players how to engage and not engage with the media. They need to understand the questioning coming from a group of reporters. The media can ask the same question two or three different ways, and if it is a question you don't want to answer, you have to teach your student-athletes how to "not answer the question they don't want to answer" with an answer. "No comment is not an option and not an answer. We need to remember there are some great stories about student-athletes, but you have to help them understand how to tell their stories and tell it the way they want it to be told, without exposing ultra-personal details, but with enough of a personal connection that the fans can relate.

During the COVID-19 period, I helped put together a documentary on the University of South Carolina called For the Culture. Within that documentary, Aliyah Boston, a first-year forward on the women's basketball team, had lost a professor who was very close to her. She did not play well in a tournament, and there were questions about her performance. There had to be a strategy on allowing her to talk about how the loss of her professor affected her without upsetting her. That was a delicate dance, but with the help of an experienced head coach like Dawn Staley, who has exhibited great leadership, as well as the sports information director who trained Aliyah on how to talk to the media, Aliyah was able to tell her story and find the heartstrings that appealed to the fans.

You look at the University of Arkansas student-athlete Chelsea Dungee. a senior guard on the women's basketball team. She and her mom were homeless. She could talk about not taking a day for granted because she watched how her mother worked so hard to provide for her and put a roof over her head. These are the kinds of stories that teach your student-athletes that it is OK to be vulnerable. It is OK to demonstrate how you persevered because you have used that as motivation and you are determined to be successful, on and off the court.

When possible, it can be helpful to give others glimpses of your team's culture through the media. A program's culture is developed by the players and the coaching staff coming to an agreement on standards that everyone buys into to help reach your common goal. When the media has a sense of those culture-defining factors for your team, it can help them understand why you emphasize certain things and how those priorities affect your decision-making.

When I coached at Purdue, our approach was that we did not just want to win a season, we wanted to have a winning program that was sustainable. It started at Purdue with head coach Nell Fortner, and I was her assistant coach. We had a rope that had knots in it and each knot stood for something specific, such as accountability, responsibility, loyalty, and commitment. The last knot was the biggest one, and it represented your higher or supreme being whatever spiritual or religious connection someone had. It was a heck of a lot easier to climb up when you had those knots to grab on to. That was the idea we used to come up with the rope concept in our team culture. You may not take responsibility seriously when you are sliding down the rope. You may not take accountability seriously, or you may not take commitment or loyalty seriously as you slide down. But that large knot at the bottom was forgiving and prevented most athletes from falling off the rope. It allowed them to climb back up the rope if they were able to reconfirm their commitment to meeting the standards that had been set. Our culture did not cut someone out for missing curfew or a similar minor transgression, and we didn't have a bunch of picky rules. But what we had, and enforced, were the program standards.

If members of the media covering your team are aware of those standards, it can help them understand why you chose to handle disciplinary issues and other matters regarding the team as you did. This will provide a context from which they communicate such incidents and decisions.

Determining exactly what to share and what not to share with the media isn't always clear cut. The key is to know your players. Make sure you have developed that relationship and have the discussion about their backgrounds and stories. You must understand what your players are comfortable sharing with the public because as a coach, you do not want to put them in an uncomfortable situation or undermine your trust with them. You really need to have an appreciation for what they have been through, where they are now, and where they are going. You want to do anything you can to help them be successful, but it is the relationship piece that you must have, and that requires mutual understanding and trust.

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