Sun Belt Institutions Announce
Partnership Between Journal
and Sport Management Conference
TROY, Ala.—Sport management faculty members at Sun Belt Conference institutions Troy University and Middle Tennessee State University today announced a strategic partnership between the Southern Sport Management Association’s (SSMA) annual conference with MTSU’s Journal of Sport Administration and Supervision (JSAS).
Dr. Fred Green, professor and faculty athletics representative at Troy and founder of SSMA, and Dr. Colby B. Jubenville, associate professor of sport management at MTSU and publisher of JSAS, announced the partnership by stating that the purpose behind the partnership was to unite two academic-based entities that shared a common mission of serving practitioners in the field of sport management.
“As more people are embracing the vision of this conference, its regional footprint is taking shape, and information that is relative and pertinent to practitioners is being disseminated,” Green said.
“Troy saw a great opportunity to connect with a fellow Sun Belt Conference institution through a synergetic relationship with JSAS.”
Such synergy, Jubenville said, revolves around the commonalities of the two entities.
“Our vision is for the journal to provide practical academic research that can be used by professionals in the sport industry to help them do their jobs better,” Jubenville said.
“Since SSMA involves both sport academicians and practitioners with students at its annual conference, it obviously shares some important core values with us, and connecting the two was a practical way to further the missions of both entities.”
SSMA will host its 5th Southern Sport Management Conference at Troy University in Troy, Ala., April 16-17, 2009. The conference aims to provide a blend of sport management academicians and practitioners who champion meaningful research and best practices to students seeking to become successful sport managers.
Prior conferences featured presentations by sport management professors from nine states in the Southeast, as well as numerous practitioners, including athletic directors, marketing professionals, team owners, sport agents, recreation directors, sports festival directors, radio personalities, and collegiate licensing directors.
Green began to formulate his vision for SSMA over seven years ago, seeking to create an affordable regional conference in the Southeast, which boasts a heavy concentration of sport management academic programs.
His vision was to provide a vehicle for professors and students to interact with professionals and discuss ways to improve the sport management discipline and the sport industry.
Jubenville was one colleague with whom Green frequently shared his vision.
“Fred and I talked about the conference for a number of years. To his great credit, he helped bring it to fruition, and our academic discipline, industry, region, and students are all better for it,” Jubenville said.
Spurred on by practitioner-oriented colleagues in the sport management academy like Green, Jubenville co-founded JSAS in 2007 along with Dr. Benjamin Goss, an assistant professor at Missouri State University.
“Ben and I saw a great deal of solid, practical sport management research coming from academic institutions that wasn’t being published by mainstream peer-reviewed sport management journals,” Jubenville said.
“We also saw a desperate need for an outlet to distribute research that wouldn’t intimidate or confuse practitioners and that was readily accessible to them, so we put together the blueprint for JSAS.”
Accordingly, Jubenville and Goss established JSAS with a mission “to develop, advance, disseminate, promote, and preserve knowledge within the academic discipline of sport management by providing an outlet that is both grounded in academic theory and driven by the needs of practitioners and the environment of the sport industry.”
Four primary drivers advance the mission, including:
Phenomenology, which shifts research focus in the sport management academy toward a more precise study of distinct phenomena, ideas, and events
Development of the Scholarly Sport Practitioner by serving as a channel of pragmatic information that encourages practitioners in the sport management field to champion ethics and pioneer innovation by helping create a greater understanding of the applicability of sport management research to their organizations, job duties, and skills
Development of social responsibility in sport organizations and stakeholders by publishing research that will enable sport organizations and stakeholders to better understand and function in their roles within sport, one of society’s more prominent, preeminent, pervasive, and powerful social institutions
Open access, which will allow the journal to disseminate research knowledge in a format that is readily and globally accessible to scholars, practitioners, students, media, and the public
To coincide with the conference opening, JSAS will publish its inaugural issue in mid-April 2009.
Goss, who serves as the journal’s editor, noted that the relationship between the conference and journal would provide a boost for both that neither could achieve alone.
“Without question, JSAS couldn’t have chosen a better partner than SSMA,” Goss said, “and the reason the partnership will be successful is because it brings a voice—which is the journal—together with a vehicle, which is the conference.
“While both the voice and the vehicle have separate strengths, they become much stronger and salient together,” Goss said.
“As time goes on, I believe we will see specific advances in the sport industry that will be direct results of this partnership, and I am anxious to watch them unfold.”
—END—
For more information, contact:
Colby B. Jubenville
615-898-2909 • jubenvil@mtsu.edu
Frederick E. Green
334-670-3764 • fegreen@troy.edu
For more information about the journal, go to:
http://www.jsasonline.org/
For more information about the conference, go to:
http://troy.troy.edu/healthandhumanservices/khp/ssm2009.html
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