Rookies and Retweets: Inside the World of University Sport, Social Media and Hazing Rituals
Cultures of Sport Hazing and Anti-Hazing Initiatives for the 21st Century
ISBN: 978-1-83753-557-6, eISBN: 978-1-83753-556-9
Publication date: 6 December 2024
Abstract
With social media use on the rise and little indication that sport team hazing ceremonies are declining, the amount and types of exposure and awareness of hazing and its potentially detrimental impacts are shifting for athletes, the public and school administrators alike. This chapter describes relationships between hazing in sport and social media use in university athletics. These two areas of research have been investigated separately but warrant a closer examination to understand how they are intertwined. In this analysis, we include findings from our larger national-scale sport hazing study that produced a second stream of data specific to social media use. Data are derived from interviews with university athletic directors, coaches and athletes to spotlight: (1) uses of social media in the context of athletics, (2) their understanding of social media's relationship to hazing and (3) experiences with social media and hazing education. We also present recommendations provided by the researchers, and athletes, coaches and athletic directors, for athletic administration use in developing educational and informational resources that address the interconnections between social media use and hazing. This chapter describes how athletic departments and coaches perceived and (dis)engaged from discussions around social media, the ways that university athletes and teams engaged in hazing practices, the diversified and multiple uses of social media on teams differing by gender, highlighting a (lack) of educational programming provided for athletes by their university athletic departments centred around social media use and sport hazing as both separate and interconnected topics.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Note
With a dearth of research specific to this area, we have included unpublished data from a larger study that looked at hazing in varsity sport, including interviews with athletic directors, coaches and athletes. It is included as the understructure of this chapter with the intention of addressing some of the gaps in our knowledge and understanding the athletic directors' and coaches' experiences with team hazing and social media use, in conjunction with the broader social experiences of athletes and hazing on Canadian university and college sport teams.
The data from the aforementioned study are mined from a qualitative inquiry which engaged semi-structured interviews with athletic directors and coaches. This research was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). The overarching goal of the project was to examine the extent, and experiences of, hazing in the culture of varsity sport in institutions under the purview of U Sports, the national governing body of university sport in Canada. While the interview guide was originally structured around hazing in sport, discussions often ballooned to include social media which was subsequently added to the interview guide. The data were coded into themes and subthemes by the researchers (Bekker et al., 2020), with regards to the athletes, the athletic directors' and coaches' relationship with, and use of, social media in the context of university sport, sport teams and sport hazing rituals.
Citation
Gudmundson, G., johnson, j., Chin, J.W. and Holman, M. (2024), "Rookies and Retweets: Inside the World of University Sport, Social Media and Hazing Rituals", johnson, j. and Chin, J.W. (Ed.) Cultures of Sport Hazing and Anti-Hazing Initiatives for the 21st Century (Research in the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 23), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 165-182. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1476-285420240000023010
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2025 Geneva Gudmundson, jay johnson, Jessica W. Chin and Margery Holman. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited