What’s Your Jock Support? (WYJS) is an ongoing McDaniel College faculty-student research project, providing students experience with rhetoric, humor, multimodal and informational design, and metajournalism. It began in May 2021 as a summer research project headed by McDaniel College Associate Professor, Docta Paul Muhlhauser, and student-researchers: Kaylen Buschhorn and Grace Maglietta. It’s in its second year and hopes to continue monday morning quarterbacking, adding, along with a lotta tongue-in-cheek and tongue-outta-cheek humor, insight into the communication practices surrounding the sports industrial complex in accessible ways.
What’s Your Jock Support? (WYJS) is a an academic research project and a platform for fans to keep a critical “eye on the ball” when deciding who to cheer and root for and why that matters. Considering that athletes, coaches, and owners and the larger professional media, who contribute massive amounts of information about sports and news cycles that generally focus on the sports in the moment (e.g., the league or teams or players in the playoffs), researching and understanding the political positions of athletes can be overwhelming. WYJS evaluates American athlete, team, and owner politics along a liberal and conservative political spectrum, helping fans make informed decisions on their support.
The content and views expressed on the WYJS platform are not representative or reflective of McDaniel College’s views. The research is funded by the College; however, the College is not a part of any of the decision-making processes related to WYJS platform.
We’ve found that supporting a team is complicated. It’s easy to be a fan of a team when it’s local: It’s your home team. It’s easy to cheer for a great player: He/she/ze has the styles, skills, and sneakers you love. It’s even easy to root for a personality: Joel Embiid makes you laugh, and Megan Rapinoe motivates you to do better. But when you start looking at player politics and values, it’s difficult to be a fan, to cheer, and to root for a team, player, or personality–“It’s gut check time.”
In the current sports media environment where the conservative and liberal positions of players, coaches, and owners are nerves being exposed in the realm of social justice, “shut up and dribble” is a difficult position to support. From Colin Kaepernick’s “taking a knee” during the national anthem and the WNBA’s dedication of their season to Breonna Taylor to women’s soccer’s fight for equity in pay, American athletes are increasingly politically polarizing—able to “speak up and dribble” for themselves in media environments. Being an athlete has become more than physical and mental prowess.
Generically safe political statements that “leave it all out on the field” and fail to “knock it out of the park” into spaces that are outside of the game are irresponsible and inequitable positions to be in for the people profiting from the sports industrial complex. It’s a way to keep things status quo and ignore the systemic power relationships that undergird sports. We’re tired of the ease with which sports figures “can drop the ball” and still be heroized.
WYJS doesn’t “pull any punches,” making sure that those who “drop the ball” with regards to equity and social justice are held accountable.
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As part of our mission, we create accessible and rhetorically equitable content for our own fans to consume.