My project is a 3-part podcast examining the relationships between athletes and fans on social media. The first episode is an overview of the sports world and social media as well as diving into what causes harassment from fans online. The second episode focusses on the influence of narratives on social media and how they can harm an athlete's reputation. The third episode focusses on an analysis of a survey that I sent out to a bunch of professional athletes.

vaNILla is the connections based, partnership driven platform for collegiate student athletes and brands to pursue Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals. The program was coded in SwiftUI as a MVP (minimum viable product). I then took a look at NIL since its enactment and analyzed the financial impact of the rule change so far by creating a literary review that discusses the need for financial literacy and collectives’ influences on recruiting.

The sneaker world today is more popular than it has ever been before. The global sneaker market was valued at an estimated $79 billion in 2020 and is predicted to reach $120 billion by 2026. A big part of the reason why the sneaker market has taken off recently is because of sneaker collaborations. A sneaker collaboration is when an outside entity, like a sneaker store, athlete or celebrity, works with a footwear brand to create a new version of the shoe. But what makes a sneaker collaboration between a sneaker company and a celebrity successful? And do the things that industry insiders say make a successful collaboration correlate with young people's level of interest in buying the shoe. Do celebrity behaviors influence college-age students' perception of the sneaker. My Barrett Honor's Thesis examines sneaker collaborations between brands and celebrities and looks to find answers to these questions.

This qualitative study examined how culture and community are created in the popular sports video game, NBA 2K. Sports video games are some of the most popular video games, but there has been lack of critical scholarship into these games. By engaging two popular cultural theories, the circuit of culture and the fields of cultural production, this study critically examined how culture shapes online communities in sports video games.By employing a variety of ethnographic methods including thick descriptions of cultural artifacts, an intake questionnaire, interviews with 17 NBA 2K players, and in-game participant observation, this study established cultural patterns, insider language, and other elements of culture within the NBA 2K community. The researcher learned to play NBA 2K, critically examined both physical and virtual cultural artifacts, conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with game players, and participated in NBA 2K with study participants to contextualize their experiences. This study established NBA 2K as having some of the most advanced functions of any sports video games, including sophisticated multi-user domains (MUDs) and complex avatar (MyPLAYER) creation. NBA 2K offers a unique opportunity to create diverse MyPLAYER representations, setting the bar for sports video games to include people from varied physical identities. Though the game has made strides to include WNBA athletes, the lack of gendered options for the MyPLAYER feature reinforces misogynistic and hegemonic power structures that are common in both sports culture and gaming culture.