To
address all of the types of situations that athletic departments go through to
keep their programs alive, Laura Ulrich published an article named “Turning the
Corner” for Athletic Management in the fall of 2008. Laura Ulrich is currently
a contributing writer for Athletic Management. This article describes how
athletic departments had to deal with all types of issues that made them look
bad, but they find a way to overcome them. Ulrich wrote this article to explain
what athletic departments have to go through just to keep their program afloat.
In
this article, Ulrich used 6 different types of situations that have happened to
explain how athletic programs have overcome some type of crisis, and how it is
possible to overcome a crisis. I will be explaining 3 of them I was really
interested in.
She first uses a situation at Montana State.
In this situation student athletes were being charged of a violent crime and
also being charged of drug dealing. This
caused the school and athletic program with have a very bad reputation. Ulrich then explains how the athletic director
at Montana State gets a group together to get this situation solved. They use a
SWOT analysis, which stands for "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and
Threats," to solve this situation. It only took two years for the program
to turn this situation around and have a good reputation again. Which I think
was a good strategy, because you need to get everyone together and find some
solution to bring the program back to where it needs to be.
The second story involves a high school having
to deal with one of their student athletes being photographed drinking and
doing drugs at a party, then the images being uploaded on Facebook. The school
doesn’t know what to do about this situation because they never had any rules
against it, but they were getting a lot of negative media about it. This
situation ended up making the school have a policy on social media sites and
pictures, which eventually spread throughout other school’s policies too. I
think this is a big problem that happens in a lot of schools these days, and I know
social media can cause a lot of trouble for people. So there needs to be some
type of policy for student athletes and their social media.
The last story I’m going to talk about
involves a Title IX problem, where a female student athlete felt like she was
being mistreated compared to the male athletes. So the school ended up asking
her what she felt wasn’t fair, and came up with a solution were the women
athletes were getting the same opportunity as male athletes. This is an issue
that all schools must take into consideration, because Title IX can cause a lot
of issues and a may cause a bad reputation for your school if you don’t watch
it carefully.
Ulrich
explains these situations very well in this article. Her argument on how
athletic programs have to deal with a lot is explained great by all of the
situations and stories that she explained.
I really enjoyed reading this article, the stories that she provided
were great and I honestly couldn’t stop reading until I found out what they did
to fix the situations. I would recommend this article to basically anyone that
likes sports or are involved in some type of sport. This deals with the crisis
that programs have to go through sometimes, and there is always some type of
problem that comes up. This article would be a great reference for people to
read and try and deal with problems they may have in their sports.
Ulrich, Laura. "Turning the Corner."
Athletic Management (2008).
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