Social media has become a huge part of sports over the past decade instant highlights, stats, and updates, enabling fans to follow leagues and teams across platforms beyond when a game airs live. This shift influences more fan engagement at many levels, from professional to Division III college sports, fostering a more connected community.
Go back even twenty years ago and it had no impact; fans had to catch highlight recaps on Sunday and Monday night football during halftime and after that it was hard to know what happened during the games. Now every highlight, play, score, achievements, and update is posted on some sort of social media almost instantly.
On a typical Sunday when watching the NFL there are usually around a dozen games and only three time slots for those games limiting the fan to watching only three full games. With the NFL having an Instagram page and all 32 teams having their own, this makes it easy for the fan to rewatch every teams big plays, see cool in-game photos and crazy player and team stat lines. The NBA is even more to keep up with, having an average of 50 games a week which is very hard to watch even a fraction of those. Baseball and Hockey also have an unwatchable number of games.
With Every professional team having a social media account it makes sure that you catch the top moments of games without sacrificing every night to the television. These leagues also have YouTube channels and will post a game recap for every game so fans can catch up. On top of all of the official pages there are thousands of fan pages for teams throughout sports that post some similar things like highlights and also post their own content.
The professional leagues and teams are the most active and followed, but even in division three there are large followings and many posts made. The Red Dragons Athletics Instagram page is the most followed in division three sports with nearly 24,000 followers, beating many division 1 school’s athletic pages. The Athletics page is a general page for all sports in the school and will not overly post for one sport but post game pictures, big wins and many achievements. Each sport team also has their own page, Men’s Soccer having the most followers out of the teams’ pages on Instagram with a little over 18,000 and Football in second with a little over 12,000. Even at the division three level, the social media pages are posting pictures from the games and practices, game times, stat lines and achievements like players of the week and more. Social media helps students to know what is happening around the campus and be more aware in the sports world for every sport.
Club teams have social media accounts which help students know their games and scores as well. Occasionally you will find Cortland sports highlights and game recaps on YouTube as well. There are Instagram pages dedicated to posting division three rankings, to see which teams are in the top 25. Social Media is still growing and will continue to grow for a long time which makes it interesting to see how much more impact in can have in the sports world over the next few decades.