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By Joe Arney

Deion 鈥淐oach Prime鈥� Sanders saw the value of an athlete鈥檚 public persona long before his football or baseball contemporaries.听

Now, as the University of Colorado Boulder takes the wraps off a NIL-themed course on sports media, management and culture, it鈥檚 hard to imagine a better model.听

鈥淐oach Prime recognized this model before there was a model,鈥� said Rick Stevens, associate dean of undergraduate education and an associate professor of media studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information. 鈥淗e understood how to perform an identity that allowed him to accomplish the business, social justice, performance and celebrity goals needed in our media system.鈥澨�

College sports have undergone tremendous upheaval following the NCAA鈥檚 adoption of a 鈥渞ight to publicity鈥� that gave athletes control over their name, image and likeness鈥擭IL for short. But those changes have rippled throughout the landscape, meaning media professionals need a new set of skills and perspectives.

The new course鈥攃alled, fittingly, Prime Time: Public Performance and Leadership鈥攊s about teaching student-athletes how to create those personas, while preparing aspiring media professionals to tell stories effectively in an age where what college athletes say as students can affect their potential earnings and influence.

鈥淭he course will teach student athletes to tell their stories strategically, in ways that help them be who they want to be, and will help journalists learn how to enable, challenge and help the stories they鈥檙e telling evolve,鈥� Stevens said. 鈥淲e have to rethink those relationships and dynamics between media icons and the media who cover them.鈥�

A prime time to create impact

Few people anticipated the new age of college sports like Sanders, who demonstrated the value of an athlete鈥檚 personal brand as a two-sport phenom in the 1990s. As head coach of the Buffaloes football team, Sanders鈥� personality and social-media impact have driven incredible returns to the university and city.

Coach Prime has already delivered a lecture听on managing social media to the class, but Stevens said the name of the course is more about the prime time personas each athlete has the opportunity to create in a limited window.听

鈥淎thletes are media celebrities whose identity gives them access to commerce, reputation, fame, all these kinds of things,鈥� Stevens said. 鈥淏ut the person who puts on the helmet has to become another person in front of the cameras. The class is trying to build a particular kind of media literacy, so that those who need to develop a prime-time narrative can think about what the pieces are and how they fit together, and make the right choices accordingly.鈥澨�

Those choices might include which products to endorse, what organizations to follow on social media and what causes to align with. Case studies that the students will examine will follow the career arcs of athletes like Colin Kaepernick, Ricky Williams and Richard Sherman, whose prime times coincided with controversy. The final project will ask teams of students to consider the best possible paths for athletes entering their prime times, both theoretical opportunities for historic cases as well as鈥攅specially as the course becomes established鈥擟U athletes exploring their social media identities or what endorsements represent the brands they want to build.听

A range of perspectives

Invited lectures, which will feature athletes, media personalities and experts from CU's athletics department, will take place one day each week. The other course day will feature a rotating cast of faculty representing CMCI鈥檚 thought leadership expertise in media studies, information science, journalism, communication, advertising and public relations.听

One of those professors is Jamie Skerski, associate chair for undergraduate studies and an expert in communication and culture. She sees the course as an opportunity to look at the individual components that make up sports culture to better understand how it鈥檚 created.

鈥淲e have this opportunity to pull apart the different elements鈥攖he representation, the producers, the consumers, the regulations, the identities鈥攖hat go into this new athletics landscape,鈥� Skerski said. 鈥淲hen you do that, you get a more nuanced, leveled view of the way the pieces of the culture interact and become normalized.鈥澨�

That is especially interesting to her from a gender standpoint. Could a more nuanced understanding of the way we consume sports change how NIL deals are executed鈥攕ay, if a male athlete gets a certain amount of sponsorship, an equal amount must go to a woman?

鈥淏ecause it鈥檚 basically the wild west right now, it鈥檚 a good time to question the status quo,鈥� she said.听

Stevens said the new perspectives of faculty invited to participate in the course have helped him think differently about pop culture, sports and media influence. It鈥檚 a feature of CMCI, which was formed about a decade ago to solve the kinds of complex, future-oriented problems coming out of media-related disciplines that are increasingly interconnected in the real world.听

鈥淭his course is very in keeping with our college鈥檚 spirit,鈥� Stevens said. 鈥淵ou have this new condition of NIL, resulting in a new arrangement among media, athletes, institutions and systems, and none of our departments are precisely positioned to answer the questions that are arising. But most of our departments have a piece of the puzzle, so by involving this many faculty, we鈥檙e able to get a more complete picture of all the dynamics involved.鈥�