APSE

 

By Tyler Killian

The Arizona Republic

 

Connecting directly with fans, students and alumni has become an increasingly larger part of the job for the athletic directors at Arizona’s two FBS universities.

 

Lisa Love, vice president for athletics at Arizona State University, and Greg Byrne, athletic director at the University of Arizona, both said they believe it is important to be accessible to both the media and the public at large.

 

The comments were made during an informal lunch session with sports editors last month at the APSE West Region annual meeting, which took place at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State’s campus in downtown Phoenix.

 

Love and Byrne are active on social media sites such as Twitter, and Byrne received national attention when he sent out a widespread e-mail asking fans, students and casual observers to report possible NCAA violations directly to him.

 

Byrne downplayed the flurry of interest his initiative caused, saying that every athletic director in the country wants to know of such violations because the repercussions can be steep if they go unreported.

 

“One of the realities for what we do is we are watched significantly more than most other industries out there,” he said. “So it’s an opportunity to learn.”

 

The session, which was moderated by Arizona Republic sports columnist Paola Boivin, began with a solemn discussion of the one college sports issue on everyone’s mind these days: the child abuse scandal engulfing Penn State.

 

Both athletic directors expressed their anguish for the alleged victims and disappointment in the situation. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more saddened,” Byrne said; Love called the circumstances “a conundrum of emotion.”

 

Another major topic was the media’s role in the coverage of college athletics and sports in general, and its impact on public perception.

 

As the conversation moved toward the concept of newsmakers increasingly looking to control the flow of information, Love emphasized the need for balance, both in the amount of coverage allotted to each topic as well as in the number of outlets participating in that coverage.

 

“That’s a balance that I strongly believe should not be lost,” Love said. “I just don’t think a one-dimensional news source is healthy.”