Members of the Ravens Sports Business Club (RSBC) have been forced to find new, virtual ways to operate amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
RSBC members are responsible for promoting, marketing and organizing events for Carleton’s varsity sports teams.
A key responsibility of the club’s members is to attend the live sports games.
Adam Coplan is a member of the RSBC Ontario University Athletics (OUA) varsity content team and a second-year communications and media studies student at Carleton.
Coplan said in his first year he was responsible for attending games and recording highlights. He would then post them to the CU Ravens Instagram story. This is one of the many forms of content the club produces.
The in-game experience is something Coplan said he misses.
“You go right down to the sidelines and get to see how the players interact and it’s a great angle to watch the game. It’s a pretty cool experience,” Coplan said.
The club gives students such as Coplan a way to keep busy. With no live sports games happening on campus, the club has found new ways to run. They are usually in charge of making content for Ravens social media accounts, such as Instagram posts, stories and tweets among other things.
“The biggest change is the different kinds of content that we have to create,” Coplan said. “I like what we are doing now, it’s fun to interact with the athletes personally. A lot of them are pretty enthusiastic about getting out there and doing content, which makes it a lot more enjoyable for us.”
During the pandemic they have come up with more creative posts and have focused more on individual player posts instead of their usual game highlights.
Another change to the RSBC this year was implementing the new esports league to its coverage.
Ethan Jackson, a third-year commerce student and a member of the RSBC esports team, said the team has faced challenges in marketing new content for sports that are new to Carleton, such as esports.
“I had to try and teach myself how to use … Discord, which was a brand-new thing to me,” he said. “That was a learning experience for sure.”
Discord is one of the primary methods of communication the various esports teams at Carleton use.
Jackson, who joined the club this year, said it is a loss to have missed out on actively attending the games. He said he is hoping he will be able to attend live varsity sports games next year, but that he has learned a lot this year despite the lack of live games.
“I do content for a junior hockey team back home as well when seasons are running, so there is a lot I can take back to that now too,” he said.
Getting to see what goes on behind the scenes and not just being a consumer of the content was a valuable experience Jackson said he gained from the club.
Some members of the RSBC Social Justice Team also said they enjoyed this year’s focus on content creation.
Korry Brankin, a second-year communications and media studies student and a member of the RSBC Social Justice Team, is running as president of the club for the 2021-2022 season.
She said the club has given her valuable experience she hopes to apply to her sports career in the future.
“I love it so much. I want to work in sports after school, so this club has given me a lot of real-world experience,” Brankin said.
Through implementing six teams this year—Online Store, Student Engagement, OUA Varsity, Social Justice, Esports, and Corporate Partnership—RSBC has been able to shift gears virtually with the help of its hard working members.
“Some [of the social media channels] have been doing as well as they’ve ever done,” Coplan said.
