Oh, the sports you can follow!

The world of sports has changed considerably over the years, and one of the most prominent changes has been the diversity of sports you can now follow. For many years, fans didn’t have a great deal of access to or information on anything but mainstream sports. Before household televisions became commonplace, most of what little information you were able to receive was through radio broadcasts or the morning newspaper. Which sports were covered there depended on your location; for example, Canadian papers frequently focused on hockey, while American ones would be big on baseball or football and British media outlets were all about soccer. There were generally tidbits on other sports included here and there, but it certainly wasn’t easy for fans of out-of-town teams or lesser-known sports to find information about what they were interested in.

Television changed the picture slightly. Fans could now watch entire games from home, which allowed more access than just reading recaps in the next morning’s papers.However, the same pattern continued at first; it was the big sports and the local teams that were televised more than anything else. Sure, there were occasional shows like ABC’s Wide World Of Sports that tried to present some of the lesser-known sports to the world, but you had to hope that they might deign to devote a few minutes to something you were interested in.

Two developments revolutionized which sports were covered in North America. First, there was the advent of cable and satellite television. There’s plenty of criticism out there in the blogosphere for ESPN, and some of it is deserved, but it should be remembered just what a difference it made to have an all-sports channel. Before then, only sports big enough to compete with conventional programming were aired, and many sports events were only shown locally. ESPN’s all-sports mandate and small-fish status at first meant they had to go beyond the typical fare of sports covered by the big networks, and they did, broadcasting such events as Aussie Rules football, Davis Cup tennis, boxing and college football and basketball while covering other events on SportsCenter. Their success paved the way for a legion of other cable channels that covered sports, and demonstrated just how much demand for sports programming was out there.

Interestingly, ESPN’s game-changing presence was at least partially a fluke. Bill and Scott Rasmussen, the network’s founders, only got into television after being fired by the World Hockey Association’s New England Whalers (who later became my beloved Hartford Whalers) in 1977. Their original concept was to buy blocks of a few hours a night on cable television to cover Connecticut sports, and that probably wouldn’t have had a huge national impact or changed sports coverage dramatically. However, thanks to a pricing quirk, it turned out that it would be cheaper to buy a continuous 24-hour national satellite feed. That prompted the Rasmussens to alter their concept to an all-sports network and forced them to broadcast more obscure sports that weren’t tied up with the big networks to fill airtime. Thanks to their success, many followed them, and some became even more specialized, leading to channels devoted solely to sports such as soccer or auto racing. Now, you can find television coverage of almost any sport you’re interested in somewhere.

The second revolutionary development came with the Internet’s rise to prominence. All of a sudden, the sports you could follow were no longer determined by the staff of your local newspaper or the channels available from your cable provider, but only by how much time you had. Love rugby? Plenty of information on it available out there. It was the same with other sports traditionally neglected in North America, including soccer and cricket. Moreover, you could now follow any team from anywhere in the world. Before the Internet, if you grew up as a fan of one team but moved away from their coverage area, you’d find following them difficult to impossible. For many, that resulted in a decreasing interest in sports altogether. The Internet largely solved that problem, not only by providing access to newspapers and other sports websites from around the world but also by allowing fans to create their own sites and get information on other sports out there.

This removal of geographic limitations allowed for a dramatic rise in interest in many lesser-known sports and teams, paving the way for a in fans. For sports fans, it was no longer necessary to only focus on the big local teams; information on whatever most appealed to you was now accessible. In most cases, people didn’t abandon the big sports altogether, but instead found interests in more obscure sports to supplement them. Regardless of your interests, there’s something out there for you.

There were a few things in the past couple of weeks that brought this to mind. On Saturday, I made the trip from Vancouver down to Seattle to watch the Sounders take on Chelsea F.C. in an exhibition along with 65,288 other soccer fans. Not all that long ago, few people in North America would have even have heard of Chelsea. These days, their players are more familiar to many locals than those on the Sounders thanks to the worldwide exposure of the English Premier League.

Another story this weekend came in a footnote in Bruce Dowbiggin’s Globe and Mail sports media column, where he mentioned that the Tour de France coverage on Versus has drawn more viewers than their coverage of the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs (479,800 viewers to an average of 442,300). Now, there are several ways to interpret that. A big part of it is the return of Lance Armstrong, while some see it as an indictment of the NHL under Gary Bettman. There’s plenty of merit to both of those views, but it’s also an indication that there’s a lot more interest in cycling in North America than there’s ever been, especially considering that much of that coverage takes place during the North American workday.

The third example came at UFC 100, which drew huge amounts of interest from around the globe (and was aptly covered here by Monchhichi Rodriguez and First Derivative). Only a few years ago, the UFC (and mixed martial arts in general) was so far underground you’d need excavating equipment to find coverage of it. Today, it’s all over major newspapers, radio stations, TV networks and the Internet. Some don’t like it, but many do, and those that do can now find coverage of it quickly and easily.

What does this all mean for fans and writers? Well, I’m inclined to think it’s a great thing for fans. No matter what your passion is, you can find coverage of it on some form of television or the Internet and get in touch with like-minded people, regardless of geographical barriers. Your opportunities to follow sports are no longer limited by where you live or what your local media outlets decide to cover. If you’re interested in something, you can usually find plenty of information on it from around the world. The only barrier now is how much time you have.

In my mind, it’s a good thing for writers as well. With the explosion of the Internet, there’s suddenly quite the audience for sports that haven’t traditionally received a lot of attention from the mainstream media. For example, one of my other writing gigs is at The CIS Blog, which focuses on Canadian university sports. These tend to draw a bit of attention from local and campus newspapers, but not a ton, and they don’t get a lot of national coverage. Now, this makes sense for local papers; there aren’t enough people in many of the towns who are interested enough in these sports to make covering them on a national scale worthwhile, so they do a bit of coverage on the local teams and leave it there. However, there is the audience out there across the country for this coverage, and that’s left a nice niche for us to fill. Traditionally, if you were a writer interested in these kind of obscure sports, you might be able to get a newspaper piece in on them once in a while, but you’d have a hard time making that information available to the fans across the country who were interested in it. The Internet’s removed that barrier. Now, you can write about what you’re passionate about, not what your editor demands, and if it’s interesting enough, people will come to read it (an argument I expounded on further here). Moreover, the increased television presence of many lesser-known sports and the availability of Internet feeds makes it possible to cover almost anything you want from the comfort of your couch.

The group that this diversification does make life difficult for is the traditional media outlets. All of a sudden, they’re no longer the only game in town. Vancouver newspapers, for example, no longer just compete against each other and local radio and TV stations for an audience, they compete against media outlets and bloggers globally. It also makes it tough for editors, who have to decide what’s likely to draw a substantial audience, and for many reporters, who have to have a working knowledge of many more sports than in the past and have a lot of pressure on them to do a good job. Previously, a beat reporter only had to outdo his counterparts from other papers and radio stations, if that. Many people would still read mainstream coverage regardless of its quality, as it was all that was available on their teams. Now, these reporters have to compete for an audience with a fleet of bloggers. If their coverage is boring or predictable, people will go elsewhere. They also have to write quicker than ever to meet the Internet’s endless deadlines and have a more difficult time being the first to the news. Many of their newspapers or television stations are in financial trouble as well, so they always have a Damoclean buyout or layoff hanging over their heads in addition. That pressure isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it results in a lot of effort and some very good material, but it certainly hasn’t made it easy to be a sports reporter.

In the end, it’s great to see so much information available on so many different sports. It encourages fans and writers to expand their horizons, and introduces many to interesting sports they might never have found. With the increased access to information and live games, you can now follow a team or a sport from anywhere in the world, and that promotes interest in sports as a whole. However, this open-access world presents us all with new challenges. For fans, it’s fishing the valuable and interesting content out there out of the mind-bogglingly vast sea of information, and making the time to keep up with everything. For writers and reporters, it’s finding ways to connect with your audience and stay on top of the game in a hyper-competitive atmosphere. The expansion of sports on television and the Internet has improved the sports world considerably, but it hasn’t necessarily made it easier.

Tags: andrew bucholtz, cycling, ESPN, Internet, Lance Armstrong, soccer, sports media, television, ufc
Categories: Daily Specials, Domestics, Imports

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Daily Specials, Domestics, Imports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.