For students with Sports Communication concentrations looking for helpful advice from some of the industry’s best, look no further than Bradley’s own backyard. The Fifth Summit on Communication and Sport will be hosted by Bradley at the Embassy Suite Conference Center in East Peoria.
From March 29 to the 31, students will have the opportunity to learn about various concepts, theories and approaches necessary in the field of communications and sports.
Dr. Paul Gullifor, the Chair of the Department of Communication and coordinator of the summit, said he is very pleased to be hosting this year’s festivities for the first time.
“This is probably the first summit that has brought in some very prominent professionals, writers, sports writers and authors,” he said. “We’ve probably taken the summit to another level. I’m not sure that I’d say there have been speakers quite as prominent as the ones we’re bringing in [this year].”
Even though he collaborated with Bradley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, the Slane Department of Communication and Fine Arts, faculty and students, Gullifor said planning this year’s event wasn’t easy.
“[There has been] a lot of work, a lot of sweat, energy and commitment from a whole lot of people,” he said. “It has taken a lot of people and a lot of effort.”
And while the conference is called the Fifth Summit on Communication and Sport, that doesn’t mean just sports communication majors will benefit.
“Putting on a conference kind of cuts across all the skills we teach here,” Gullifor said. “Event planning, promotion, publicity, PR, journalism, advertising, graphic design; just the act of putting on a conference I think is a pretty good exercise for our students.”
More than 150 students have pre-registered for the event, including various students from multiple other majors.
“I think [this event is beneficiary] for several reasons,” Gullifor said. “One is to expose them to sports communication as a discipline, not just a practice like sports writing and sports play-by-play. The displace to see there’s a science behind this, that there is scholarship being conducted into sports communication and I think they need to see the academic side of discipline.”
