Salt Lake Community College is home to seven sports teams in the Scenic Athletic Western Conference, which is part of the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA).
According to the SLCC Athletics website, the Bruins have had “over 160 NJCAA All Americans [and] 746 Academic All Region athletes” since joining the NJCAA in 1985. But, despite SLCC’s successes, sports at the college seem to go unnoticed.
Oftentimes, SLCC athletic programs and their accomplishments receive little acknowledgment, whether from students and staff, campus and local media, or in advertisements. But players and coaches have said they’ve noticed the relative quiet.
A lack of local coverage
Head baseball coach DG Nelson, whose Bruins rank No. 9 in the latest NJCAA poll, said the team does garner some recognition, just not from the surrounding community.
“We have more respect nationally than we do locally,” Nelson said.
Sports coverage in Utah can be competitive, due to the popularity of major professional franchises as well as athletic programs at larger colleges.
SLCC softball, led by head coach Cyndee Bennett, currently sits No. 5 in the NJCAA rankings. Bennett said she thinks that Bruin sports sometimes fall even lower on the totem pole of media coverage than local high schools.
“What does the media cover? They cover the four-year schools, and then they really focus on the high schools,” Bennett said. “And we somehow get missed.”
For example, the website for ABC4 Utah includes categories for pro teams such as the Utah Jazz and Real Salt Lake, and categories for NCAA Division I schools like the University of Utah, Utah State, and Brigham Young University.
ABC4 also has a dedicated high school sports category, which covers schools like Snow Canyon and Union High. But no categories exist for junior college athletics or SLCC. Similarly, other local outlets such as KSL and FOX 13 currently lack a dedicated category to SLCC in their span of sports coverage.
The need for schoolwide awareness
Besides the infrequent coverage of Bruin sports in local media, other factors exist that leave SLCC students, faculty and staff uninformed about the successes of their school’s teams.
As a commuter school, SLCC educates a wide range of students from all walks of life. The diversity of the student body and their backgrounds produces a unique and substantial campus community. But these students may have many other responsibilities outside of school, including families and jobs, that take up time that could otherwise be used to attend sporting events.
Lyra Frencesca, a general education student in her first semester at SLCC, said she’s only attended classes at South City Campus in her time at the college so far. She said she hasn’t heard anything about the different athletic programs the college offers, which are centered at SLCC’s Taylorsville Redwood Campus.
“I would love to [attend a game],” Frencesca said. “I just don’t hear about it or seek it out, unfortunately.”
AJ Lester, a film major in his second semester at SLCC, said that while he knows there are sports programs at the college, he hasn’t heard anything about the many Bruin teams and players. Lester said he thinks the wide-reaching spread of SLCC’s eight campuses is one reason why sports aren’t more prevalent in the lives of students.
“Our campus[es] are kind of smaller, people are spread out more … the sports happen at only one place, so people miss it if [they] only have classes at [a different] campus.”
The need for internal buzz
Many students, faculty and staff at SLCC have said they don’t know of a way to keep up with the various Bruin teams, championships, awards, and student athletes who make the plays. A lack of internal publicity contributes to the gap.
SLCC alumnus Sean Stetson, a former editor-in-chief at The Globe, said he knows that student media could do a better job in covering college athletics. As editor-in-chief, Stetson said he had difficulty finding people who were interested in attending games and writing about SLCC Athletics.
“It’s hard to force someone to go watch a sport and cover it,” Stetson said. “So, I need people that actually like sports to go cover [them].”
Stetson added that, in a perfect world, The Globe would work diligently to highlight all the different athletic programs at SLCC, documenting and broadcasting each team’s wins and accomplishments. However, because The Globe is a small, student-run newspaper, it doesn’t have the manpower to do so.
A new game plan for game day
SLCC’s Athletics Department is brimming with leaders who are determined to solve the awareness deficit surrounding sports at the college.
For instance, Kevin Dustin, director of athletics and recreation at SLCC, said he has several ideas that may help:
- Overhaul the department’s social media efforts.
- More effectively utilize the TV display monitors at all SLCC campuses to advertise the teams and their games.
- Schedule games earlier in the day to accommodate the lives of busy students.
Brian Preece, assistant sports information director for SLCC Athletics, reaffirmed that SLCC has some unique challenges when trying to advertise sports.
“Because of the size of SLCC [as a whole] and the size of the campuses, it’s hard to get the message out,” Preece said.
Alongside Dustin, Preece has been workshopping ways to improve the department’s outreach attempts.
For instance, Preece said he is interested in starting an email newsletter that SLCC community members could subscribe to for sports updates. Preece said he also hopes to coordinate with professors in other departments to visit with classes and raise firsthand excitement about athletics at the college.
“[I want to] reach people where they are instead of [making] them find us,” Preece said.
