Communication and Sport Division
Interest Group Awards
Listed here are awards given by the Interest Group to its members. Interests Groups are smaller communities within NCA's large membership that provide a range of resources including networking opportunities, Annual Convention programming, leadership opportunities, awards, and specialized information dissemination channels, among others.
Read more about this Interest Group.
Top Overall Paper Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Nicky Lewis & Travis Bell, “Unnecessary Roughing?: A Longitudinal Content Analysis of Violent Penalties and their Role in Sanitizing NFL Broadcasts” |
| 2022 | Alaina Zanin, Loretta LeMaster, Lucy C. Niess, & Haley R. Lucero, Arizona State University, "Storying the Gender Binary in Sport: Narrative Motifs Among Transgender, Gender Non-Conforming Athletes" published in Communication & Sport in 2023. |
| 2021 | Emilee Shearer & Anthony Peavy , "Attempts at Renewing Her Career: Serena Williams and Her Year of 2018" |
| 2020 | Kyle R. King, “'You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby': The Evolution of Billie Jean King’s Feminism and the Battle of the Sexes in Public Memory" |
| 2019 | Gregory A. Cranmer, Jimmy Sanderson, David Cassilo, and Bailey Troutman, "Social Media Discourse about Division-I Football Players' Announcements of Early Exit: The Role of Expressed Fandom" |
| 2018 | Michael Serazio, "The Transformations in American Sports Journalism: Managing Access and Autonomy in the Production of Infotainment" |
| 2017 | Jacob Justice, "From Communist Nightmare to American Dream: Mythic Rhetoric in Senator Marco Rubio's 2016 Tribute to Jose Fernandez" |
| 2016 | Kyle King, “The Spirituality of Sport and the Role of the Athlete in the Tennis Essays of David Foster Wallace” |
Top Student Paper Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Dafna Kaufman, "'Football is….': Populism, (Homo)nationalism, and Strategies for New NFL Audiences" |
| 2022 | Dafna Kaufman, "Intolerable Fairness: The Biotrope of Fair Play" |
| 2021 | Nathaniel Repay, "A Rhetoric of Fire at the Intersection of Race, Politics, and Sport" |
| 2020 | Patrick Gentile and Nicholas Buzzelli, "Hablamos Inglés: Media Portrayals of English-Proficient Latin American MLB Players" |
| 2019 | Ashley Danielle Garcia and William R. Cooney, "The Processional Hymn of Sunday Night Football: Praising the Patriotic Unity in 'Oh, Sunday Night'" |
| 2018 | Jeanette E. Musselwhite, "Gender Perfomativity: Contradictions and Empowerment Through Femal NFL Fandom" |
| 2017 | Jacob Justice, "From Communist Nightmare to American Dream: Mythic Rhetoric in Senator Marco Rubio's 2016 Tribute to Jose Fernandez" |
| 2016 | Kyle King, “The Spirituality of Sport and the Role of the Athlete in the Tennis Essays of David Foster Wallace” |
Lawrence Wenner Emerging Scholar Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Yannick Kluch |
| 2022 | David Cassilo |
| 2021 | Linsay Cramer |
| 2020 | Travis R.Bell |
| 2019 | Natalie Brown- Devlin |
| 2018 | Michael Devlin |
| 2017 | Gregory Cranmer |
Outstanding Book Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2022 | Guy Harrison, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, On the Sidelines: Gendered Neoliberalism and the American Female Sportscaster, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2021. |
| 2021 | Gregory M. Cranmer, Athletic Coaching: A Communication Perspective |
| 2020 | Travis R. Bell, Janelle Applequist, and Christian Dotson-Pierson, CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic |
| 2019 | Andrew C. Billings and Jason Edward Black, Mascot Nation: The Controversy over Native American Representations in Sports |
| 2018 | Daniel A. Grano, The Eternal Present of Sport: Rethinking Sport and Religion |
| 2017 | Robert Kerr, How Postmodernism Explains Football and Football Explains Postmodernism: The Billy Clyde Conundrum |