I had lunch with a former high school classmate last week, like me an aspiring journalist and, like me, a blogger. She asked me how many different sites I had ever posted for, and, silly me, I told the truth: two.
When she told me that she wrote regularly for four blogs - two were paying gigs, one served to keep the fam up to date on her goings-on, and the last one was a personal diary - I didn't know who to be sad for, me or her. These days, who doesn't blog?
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College athletes, for one. At least not about their sports teams. To me, that's a bit puzzling. For a group that often clamors for coverage and then wants to control it as tightly as possible, why not engage in a little digital self-promotion and take control of the public-relations machine? Forget Jay Bilas- - who wouldn't have read what was going through Michael Beasley's head during the NCAA Hoops Tournament straight from the horse's NBA-bound mouth?
DP alum Buzz Bissinger and his old-school ilk have a point when they argue that most blogs are devoted to cruelty, dishonesty and sensationalism, but if ever there was a crowd that could use them for good, D-I athletes - especially those in less visible programs - are it. And the other big knock on sports blogs, that they operate from a distance and lack access, wouldn't apply. Here, the bloggers themselves would be the ones getting accessed, so to speak.
College coaches, a justifiably paranoid group, obviously don't want players breaking sensitive in-house news (a la Curt Schilling) or venting on-the-field frustrations (a la Donovan McNabb) in a public forum. It could cost them their image as masters of their domain and worse, their pride.
But in that respect, is an athlete's blog any more dangerous a medium than what's already available on the Web? What's worse for an athletic program: an occasional but harmless leak of insider information, or careless Facebook albums filled with activities not sanctioned by the NCAA? We can reasonably assume the latter. A former Penn athlete told me that she was never cautioned against blogging by the athletic department - only told by a coach to take down any online photos containing red cups and the like.
And Penn athletes have written about themselves publicly before. The women's squash team filed dispatches from South Africa earlier this year, although those posts weren't anywhere near as juicy as what you might find about the team on juicycampus.com.
A public space for musings on one's team would generate interest, and some transparency too. At first, the message board posters couldn't figure out why the men's basketball team was having a tougher time on defense in Glen Miller's first year as coach.
But when power forward Stephen Danley started blogging for The New York Times after he graduated, he gave us the answer. The team's new method for handling picks was harder for the youngsters to pick up than Fran Dunphy's, but might be better in the long run.
That fact was probably obvious to anyone actually on the team and executing the playbook - just not to us uncoordinated dummies in the stands. I think the same principle would apply to more serious matters, like why athletes quit teams, how the Ivy League really recruits and what separates programs that win from those that tread water. A few insights from athletes would go a long way toward improving the dialogue on those issues.
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Right now, you're reading one of the only significant voices for Penn athletes: the DP. Our publication and WXPN are about it - and that's not enough. If we writers had some competition from sources inside the system itself, the public would better understand the nuances of college athletics and the problems facing it. College athletes shouldn't put all their public-relations eggs in one basket, or one newspaper. As any Whartonite will tell you, a monopoly hurts everyone. Quakers, pick up thy keyboards and blog.
Andrew Scurria is a senior International Relations major and is former Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is scurria@dailypennsylvanian.com
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