Celebrating the “aha!” in learning
Picture this: You’re watching the goalie, your heart in your throat, stop the ball again and again. Tracing a touchdown sprint in the final seconds of the game, your blood is pumping fast while sitting in your own living room. Spilling a full beer onto your socks, you leap up to cheer for the winning home run.
Moments like these can earn fan loyalty for decades. But despite this devotion, some fans cry foul when things get political. Should they root for a player whose political beliefs differ from their own, they wonder?
In recent years, athletes’ politics have been more readily apparent, meaning the connections between sports and politics are more researchable than ever before.
That’s why Associate Professor Paul Muhlhauser, an expert of rhetoric and composition, launched What’s Your Jock Support? in 2021. The sports-pun-filled database tracks athletes’ politics and provides resources on the link between sports and politics.
Ambitious student-researchers have joined the project as part of the Student-Faculty Collaborative Summer Research program, funded by the Casey Allers Impact Fund and the Salomon Research Fund.
This year, students Emily Trachoo, Jenn Madison, Izzi Sweet, and Jeremy Hasson developed political scorecards for athletes and team owners — in the form of digital trading cards. By tallying the actions and statements of athletes, they can keep fans informed, build their research capabilities, and have fun doing it.
Above all, the project originates from an enduring love of sports.
“I have a passion for sports; they’re my soap operas,” says Muhlhauser, who’s an avid basketball and football fan who has watched ESPN’s “Around the Horn” for years.
“There’s intrigue: Will this athlete play after an injury? What have they done outside of athletics?” When that intrigue naturally led him down the rabbit hole of social media and media coverage, Muhlhauser made some surprising discoveries.
“Athletes now have all these platforms to talk about things that they haven’t in the past,” he says. “I found that seeing what they’ve said or done made me not want to cheer for certain teams or athletes.”
Unable to personally separate athletes from their politics, he wanted answers to a few questions: Who are we really cheering for? Who are we giving money to? Do we want to keep up the support?
“I want to make a difference, so people can get more knowledge not just about players, but teams and owners,” he says.
A major “aha moment” for students is how much the project is tied to communication.
The researchers have covered every base, with infographics, articles, podcasts, and social media content. All with the goal of clarifying complex topics for a wide audience.
“I loved brainstorming with my peers and developing and applying my video editing skills, which I learned in a McDaniel class,” says Trachoo, who is a senior Marketing major and Psychology minor from Frostburg, Maryland.
“I think the most fun part was seeing what my fellow students were creating,” says Madison, a junior who hadn’t spent much time thinking about sports before this past summer.
Sweet, a senior English major with a minor in American Sign Language from Brooklyn, New York, says the project helped her go from a behind-the-scenes kind of person to feeling more comfortable on camera. She stars in videos as well as a podcast titled “There’s no ‘I’ in Teen: Playing Sports/Playing Identities” with Muhlhauser and Professor of Psychology Jack Arnal — in which they discuss how teen identities connect to sports in “High School Musical” and the 1986 “Teen Wolf.”
“It gave me an opportunity to see new perspectives and question whether sports and politics should be related, and if so, how much,” Sweet says.
“Delving into the full picture, you see how complex humans are. No one is all one thing or another,” she adds. “You want your team to win, so it’s easy to root for someone just because they’re a good athlete. But this project is a good resource if you want to root for a player based on who they are as a person.”
Beyond major headlines, you may not be aware of the politics of your star player. Some fans may even prefer that politics stay far away from the field — according to the researchers, there are a lot of balls to juggle on the topic.
“It’s not that people don’t want to know the politics of athletes, but that they believe sports and politics shouldn’t mix,” says Madison, a Writing and Publishing major from Reisterstown, Maryland.
Her favorite part of the project was conducting research through the Hoover Library databases, then creating infographics tallying team visits to the White House and the common arguments for and against mixing sports and politics.
Those arguments range from philosophical to personal.
“When athletes step back from the game and speak on topics they’re passionate about, are they breaking an invisible fourth wall? What exactly are they disrupting?” Trachoo says.
“For some fans, sports are an escape from the political friction in the world, and I think it’s important to have those safe havens for everyone,” Sweet says. “But I also support people using their platforms to spread a message they believe in.
“Looking at things from multiple perspectives is a way to understand the complexity of the world and learn how sports are impactful in so many people’s lives,” she adds.
The mixing of sports and politics may even rise to the international level, according to Trachoo. “I grew up watching Thai sports teams, and there seems to be more separation between sports and politics there,” she says.
She “did more research on American athletes than ever before. I realized that it plays a significant part in our culture, and I think the influence of American sports has spread around the world.”
Recently, in the local mall near her hometown in Thailand, she saw a store called MLB — Major League Baseball — with American sports team paraphernalia. “It’s interesting that it’s right there in Thailand, at my local mall.”
“I don’t want it to seem like this is static. People evolve and change,” Muhlhauser says. “Just because something happened doesn’t mean you have to stop cheering forever. Maybe they do something else that makes you feel like they’ve changed, and you start cheering again.”
Whether a fan wishes to separate politics from the game will always be a personal choice, and What’s Your Jock Support? is an evolving resource for curious sports enthusiasts.
The major takeaway for students? “The joy,” Muhlhauser says. “Joy is my thing.”
“We brought anything to the table,” Trachoo says, “and Dr. Muhlhauser gave us the freedom to explore any topic we wanted to and was there to give us advice.”
“Professor Muhlhauser’s approach to summer research is really unique and definitely fun,” Sweet says. “He is a very engaging teacher, and I like that it feels just as important to him that we are growing and learning, not just that the project is.”