The hardest part in Sports PR is to maintain a good reputation for the sports team-- in order to gain more fans and get more people to the games. For a PR person this doesn't only mean to look promote things on the field, like the games and awards the team has won, but to also promote activities off the field, like community service players have done, etc.
So when things like what happened with the Oregon Ducks according to Greg Covelle's blog. It is hard to create a good image for the athletic program, with so much negative press.
"The Oregon Ducks have been out of the papers and headlines recently which has brought nothing but glee to everyone working over at the school. The school over the past two years has had athletic director changes, heisman canidates suspended for the majority of seasons, and all star quaterbacks forced to transfer after getting involved with crime off the field. Just as the school begins to really make some noise on the field, it starts making a lot more noise off of the field."
This is true crisis management for a PR team. How do you change the image of the Oregon Ducks? Now that their activities off the field have a huge impact on their image as athletes. This relates to my second blog post when I talked about how people are more concerned with the personal lives of athletes rather than their performance on the field. Athletes, even at the college level, are looked at like celebrities.
This also brings me to Laura's blog dealing with the ethics in celebrity privacy. I agree that there is, it seems, no privacy at all. The same can be said about the privacy of athletes, especially those in college. They are just students, do they have the right to privacy or has their status as a college athlete the same as a celebrity, so they have no choice because they are in the public eye? Should PR professionals deal with an athlete in a image crisis the same way you would a celebrity.
No comments:
Post a Comment