Communication in the Community of Sport: The Process of Enacting, (Re)Producing, Consuming, and Organizing Sport

The community of sport is a pervasive, influential, complex, and restricted community comprised not only of participants such as coaches, athletes, and referees, but also of spectators at both live and mediated sporting events. Additionally, sports media, amateur and professional sports organizations, sport governing bodies, and fan clubs occupy terrain in the community of sport. We maintain that membership and participation in the community of sport are communicatively accomplished and maintained and that communication functions to constitute and give meaning to the experience of sport. For this reason we assert that the community of sport represents a communicatively rich locale that warrants the attention of communication scholars. Accordingly, we set out to explore the intersection of communication and sport within this chapter. Drawing on literature from the field of communication studies as well as from associated fields we discuss how members in the community of sport communicatively enact, (re)produce, consume, and organize sport. In each of these respective areas we discuss and