Final Reflections

Before I took this class, my perception of US sport was that there is a lot of money involved, there's a lot of ugly things going on that are invisible to the common consumer, and that I knew there was a dark side to sport but never really looked into the actual details of it. As a fan, it can get easy to get washed up in everything about sports and not take a critical look at how mass entertainment can influence our values and the way we think about the world and each other. I've definitely grown in how I understand sport, but almost more so from the athletes in the class themselves. I used to be on a highly athletic path and I could just as easily see myself in their shoes; various circumstances have put me where I'm at and them where they're at, and I have enjoyed seeing how our perspectives have changed and developed over the years since I've left the realm of participating in sport and crossed into the consumer realm.

It's hard to predict the influence this class will have on whether or not I will ask more critical questions concerning sport moving forward. On the one hand, consuming sport and being a sports fan can be a very fun and engaging hobby (or way of life, really) and to acknowledge a lot of the things we talk about can serve to diminish the pleasure one gets from consuming their sport. But not to acknowledge some of these things is to turn a blind eye and be an ignorant sheep, a part of the herd. It comes down to enjoying the sport we love while doing what we can ourselves, as fans, to help these issues find solutions.

I'm not sure of the applicability of skills from this class to my future career. For one, I'm still not entirely sure what I want that career to be, and two, I've taken a couple other sociology classes and the general skills are similar, differing in what they're applied to. But I can say that as a psychology major, if I pursue a career in psych I will definitely be a better informed psychologist having taken this class. Intersectionality is a huge take away for me, from all sociologically-minded classes including this one, and I think it will be an important concept to keep in mind throughout my life, as a young middle-class white male able-bodied person, in assessing to what degree my accomplishments are wholly merited or thanks in part to my social privileges.