By Mark Morales
Sacred Heart University Athletics has many different social media accounts available to their fans and students.
Their official athletics account @SHUBigRed is run by Athletic Communications. There are also individual accounts for most of the sports team.
Athletic Communications provides game previews and game recap for all 32 Division I varsity sports. They also manage the content that goes online.
“We have official athletic accounts which are department wide, and that’s run by the athletic communications staff. Then the teams have their own Twitter/Facebook pages and those are managed by the coaches,” said Senior Associate Athletic Director Christopher O’Connor.
There is a difference between the official athletic
accounts and the personal sports teams accounts.
“The official accounts are newsier and provide more official information. The sports teams accounts are more connecting to different groups, they help recruit and help connect alumni,” said O’Connor.
Figuring out what goes on the social media accounts is a process of its own.
“It’s a mix and match. We have a number of different outlets where we try to put information out,” said
O’Connor. “Obviously our official athletic website is where all of our news goes.”
There is a difference in the way the various social media accounts are used.
“Twitter we try to use informationally,” said O’Connor. “Facebook has become more of a way where it’s almost a second website where we post a lot of links. Instagram is where we try to reach our student base, so that’s more of a game day type of post or student of the week type of thing. We try to get a lot of content out to all of them without being super repetitive.”
Athletic Communications is responsible to cover all the home games as well as a select number of road games.
“We only staff road games for a select number of sports; men’s and women’s basketball and football,” said O’Connor. “The games that we have more staff at, we can do more updates.”
The only team that Athletic Communications does not run social media for is the equestrian team. Athletic Communications also doesn’t send a representative to their events because they do a lot of Twitter updates through their own coaching staff.
There are many options to get news and scores on
Pioneer Athletics.
“I thought that following @SHUBigRed would be easier to get updates on all the sports teams rather than following all of them individually,” said junior Nicholas Rivera.
