In an effort to reach students across the country, the University of Indianapolis Sport Management program has started a podcast headed by graduate student Cody McCulloch. The podcast, titled “The Greyhound Guide: Sport Management” has released 11 episodes so far with various sport management alumni at UIndy, according to McCulloch. The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcast and other locations, according to McCulloch. He said that this podcast can help with the decision-making process for potential students.
“Before I came back to UIndy because I did my undergrad [at UIndy], I flew out to Arizona when [I had] my last spring break of undergrad to check out [a] grad school out there,” McCulloch said. “I was just telling Dr. [Jennifer] VanSickle, really the only way to learn about school is to take out a chunk of time in your day and you have to do research on the internet and stuff and do campus visits. I was saying, it’d be cool if someone can learn about it while they’re driving their car or while they’re working out and have their headphones on. It’d just be another way to get the information and not take time out of your day.”
McCulloch said that prior to starting this project, he had very little experience working with audio or any of the programs that podcasters use and that has been one of the bigger challenges so far. He said that the podcast launching during quarantine has helped its growth.
“I know the first few episodes I did, the people were all on board cause they were just saying ‘I’m home bored whenever.’ So I think that helped,” McCulloch said. “Then the idea that, several of the people are long-distance and it’s just cool to be able to put it up on our LinkedIn page: ‘Go check our interview with an alumni from 10 years ago.’ Our programs at UIndy do [have] a lot of people coming and speaking to the class, but obviously that’s a small field of people because people go outside of the state for work. So I think it’s also helped reconnect us with professionals in other areas.”
According to Professor and Program Director for Sport Management Jennifer VanSickle, McCulloch has been running the whole show, with VanSickle having shown little influence over the product. She said that one of the biggest strengths of the podcast is the student voice it has.
“We were thinking about different ways that we could let people know about our sport management programs,” VanSickle said. “There was a video on our website, we try to do tweets and we try to do Instagram photos, but to allow students to hear from other students about what their experiences have been, we thought it might be a great way to reach out and just let them know about our program.”
So far McCulloch has spoken with several different guests all from different positions within the sport management community. He said that his favorite experience was getting a chance to do an episode with former UIndy Athletics Sports Information Graduate Assistant Alec Rohr in one of the first episodes.
“We [McCulloch and Rohr] had undergrad classes together,” McCulloch said. “I saw that when I posted [about the episode] on Twitter, Alec retweeted it. And he’s like, ‘If you want to see me rambling about Michael Stipe, go check out the episode.’ So that was cool.”
VanSickle said that so far McCulloch has done a great job and that this is something she wants to be a mainstay in the program for the future, even after McCulloch graduates.
“Cody’s [McCulloch] here for two years. He’s our graduate assistant for two years, but we’ll have somebody else come along after him,” VanSickle said. “So I will hand down the torch and will allow that person to have their own creative ideas in terms of the questions they want to ask or the format, but all in all, we’d love to see it [the podcast] continue. We think he started something great.”
