IU becomes college sports headquarters

Prepare for cloudier game-winning slides, louder rantings at referees and truck-ramming tackles as IU’s National Sports Journalism Center announces the Associated Press Sports Editors is joining the Hoosier family.

Founded 35 years ago, the Associated Press Sports Editors is the nation’s largest professional-sports journalism organization, including more than 550 members who are top online sports executives and from newspapers across the nation. The Associated Press Sports Editors will place its first official home at IU’s new National Sports Journalism Center on the campus of IU-Purdue University Indianapolis.

“It will offer us a foothold to a college campus and interaction with college kids,” said Garry D. Howard, president of the Associated Press Sports Editors.

The new home for sports journalists will offer a place for all IU students to learn more about the career of sports journalism.

IUPUI is located in one of the largest sports hubs in the nation, as Indianapolis has been host to the 1987 Pan American Games, five men’s NCAA Final Fours and the NCAA headquarters. The city will be host to next year’s men’s Final Four and the Super Bowl in 2012. The location will allow sports journalists a broad avenue of outlets, said Tim Franklin, director of the National Sports Journalism Center.

“I can’t think of too many other things that more closely unite a community than a sports team,” Franklin said.

Franklin said he and the IU School of Journalism Dean Brad Hamm have talked about how one of their mutual goals is to “not just teach game story writing, but to teach them business aspects of sports and the societal aspect.”

The new sports center will help integrate the sports-related programs between the IUPUI and Bloomington campuses.

“It’s going to give students and our sports journalism program access to some of the best professionals,” said Beth Moellers, director of communications and alumni relations for the journalism school.“Both organizations are going to have access to people and programs that they wouldn’t otherwise.”

The center will contain a new student-media center for the IU School of Journalism with a hall of fame to honor recipients of the prestigious Red Smith Award and Associated Press Sports Editors’ past presidents.

The Red Smith Award was established by the Associated Press Sports Editors in 1981 and is given for lifetime achievement in sports journalism.

With Associated Press Sports Editors being host to two annual conventions, the journalism school said it hopes the National Sports Journalism Center can be a home to one of the conventions.

“It makes a lot of sense to do it here because we’re centrally located in the U.S.,” Franklin said. “We’re a day’s drive within most of the U.S. population. It’s a convenient location.”

Associated Press Sports Editors and the journalism school will work to tighten the sports journalism not only at IU but also at other universities and colleges with training seminars, Howard said. As college students, sports journalism majors do not have the experience to know fully how to do their job, Howard said.

“You’re trying to learn what you’re going to have to do on a professional level,” Howard said. “We can make the transition easier, showing it’s not as hard as it looks. That’s what’s going to make this relationship respectable. We’re going to be able to answer a lot of those questions.”

The IUPUI and Bloomington campuses will offer courses this fall that will be taught via video conference from IUPUI to Bloomington. Both schools are planning to include more sports media courses for fall 2010.

Franklin, an IU alumnus, past sports editor for the Chicago Tribune and former editor of the Baltimore Sun, was hired to make the program a premier sports-media institute, starting with sports journalism courses.

Hiring top faculty into the journalism school along with starting new classes will help expand IU students’ sports-media network and knowledge.

“It’s a strong statement by the nation’s largest sports professional journalism organization that they believe in us and want to be associated with Indiana’s sports journalism center,” Franklin said.