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Teaching and Talking Sports, One Post at a Time
Education wasn’t always such a flashpoint issue. Children went to all levels of school, consumed the knowledge of an instructor, some things stuck, and some didn’t. Now Gen X and Millennials are parents of those participating in and graduating from the US educational system, in all its varied forms, and life is a bit different than when we older generations were in school. More than a bit, actually, especially when it comes to students’ aspirations, influences, and mediums.
It’s common now for kindergarten graduates to include “YouTuber” or “Influencer” in their “What I Want to Grow up to Be” section as they shuffle in their tiny robes across the stage of their schools’ cafetoriums. While our inner curmudgeons may scoff and say, “That’s not a real job,” being an influencer is a very real job now. Teachers regularly take to social media to share tutoring, specialized subject matter for broader consumption, or simply to express their creativity in ways that might not be allowed in a traditional classroom setting. To cement influencing as a real profession, Arizona State University now offers a Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation through their Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Additionally, as those who are parents of teenagers can attest, your student’s peers will become equally if not more important to children’s learning than their classroom instructors or guardians, if they haven’t already, and this is what made my interview with social media sports content creator Alex Parsons both impactful and relevant.
Photo credit: D Adelson Photography
Alex, a recent graduate from Fort Worth Country Day School, aspires to be a filmmaker and pursue a career in media. Searching for his social media handle @@APTalksSportss will return a headshot of a handsome, dark-haired young man with his hand formed in the well-known Frog symbol of Texas Christian University (TCU). His following on his social media accounts is modest compared to social media superstars: 7,800 on TikTok and YouTube, respectively, and approximately 4,000 on Instagram. Mind you, for a channel that started with a rising high school junior filming videos in his bedroom roughly two years ago, the growth is quite impressive.
Alex’s earliest sports memory is an iconic one for most Fort Worthians, although he wasn’t quite three years old at the time. He remembers watching TCU’s victory over Wisconsin in the 2011 Rose Bowl – a game his father attended. Ever since that historic game, sports have been something he watches, talks about, and uses to connect with people. While the usual sports talk show elements of commentary and analysis are something he’s consumed for years, his channel was born of a desire to produce content he’d want to consume.
“It didn’t always need to be louder,” Alex said of the mainstream sports networks’ shows and opinions. His personal presentation style is measured and humorous, leaving subscribers and viewers with an easy takeaway and jumping-off point into one area of sport, usually giving a quick opinion or sometimes performing a skit that anyone from teenagers to octogenarians can relate to and enjoy.
The subjects and sports he covers are relevant and timely but not breaking news. Alex admitted that chasing the most up-to-date happenings has interested him, but he realized he was ultimately fighting a losing battle against large media corporations with multi-million-dollar budgets. His niche, as he’s refined it, is offering a unique opinion in an easy-to-consume format that even people without extensive knowledge of the subject can take into their day, discuss with their family or peers, or delve deeper into if it’s an area of interest. @APTalksSportss covers everything from the typical, large-following team pageantry of college football and the NBA to professional fighting, golf, and most recently, the World Cup.
Alex doesn’t view himself as an educator per se, though he exhibits many hallmarks of effective pedagogy, sometimes without realizing it. Lessons should be – and many teachers strive for them to be – educational and engaging. Too much information at once is a recipe for disaster and is almost guaranteed to lose your student audience unless it’s already in their realm of interest. Alex manages his “classroom” by engaging with posters in the comments and moderating interactions among followers, so his posts stay light and respectful and his channel is a place where people feel safe expressing differences of opinion constructively.
“I didn’t want a negative following, because you’re going to be wrong about things sometimes, and I’ve seen many creators be completely turned on by subscribers just ready to pounce at the first sign of something like that.” This is another facet of his personality that makes Alex seem much wiser than his 19 years – his vulnerability, an increasingly rare quality in these very loud days, as well as his ability to take criticism in stride and acknowledge that he’ll be wrong sometimes. He knows it’s all just part of the work of getting better and building something lasting.
Great teachers aren’t always experts in their subjects but specialize in connection with students. In an effort to connect with his followers, Alex undertook a most ambitious challenge: drawing and coloring a small baseball-type card for each one of his new subscribers, which he hung on his bedroom wall. It was, to say the least, an audacious task that he admitted started to dominate his life. He begrudgingly abandoned the cards because finals and Advanced Placement testing season demanded he must. Still, as with many good things, the effort should be recognized as much as the end product.
The channel should be required viewing for neophyte content producers because Alex works hard on it. He estimated spending between three and five hours per day on shooting, writing, or editing to post four or five times per week, as well as creating quick social media stories. He probably spends more time creating for his small sports accounts than most people do on their hobbies, but it’s real. He remembered thinking that as his editing and producing skills improved, he would spend fewer hours creating his posts, but instead, the same amount of time now produces cleaner content, something he’s immensely proud of. “The work doesn’t get easier; you just get better at it.”
As Alex’s channel has grown, so has his perspective on the balance between creating a perfect product and publishing enough content to keep his followers engaged and commenting. Alex acknowledged that quality versus quantity can be a tough trade-off, describing posts that had taken him hours of production time that he was extremely proud of but flopped in terms of viewer numbers. “It’s more important to be consistent than to have an absolutely perfect product” is a valuable lesson for both students and those in the workforce alike. A compromise between perfectionism and productivity is essential for everyone, regardless of their goal or industry.
Alex is constantly learning about social media, taking advantage of the wealth of information on how to be an influencer, be it suggestions from platforms on the best times to post for engagement or learning new editing software to create an aesthetic and flow that reflect his channel’s personality. He works hard to perfect his craft to both grow his channel and lead into the next phase of his life. His commitment to creating better posts for his outlets is admirable, and his output is somewhat staggering for the relatively short lifespan of the channels. A casual Instagram search currently shows he has created more than 900 posts. He jokingly said that he shouldn’t be judged by his early endeavors, but that he would rather show progression and a steadfast desire to deliver a better product to his audience.
Despite his love of TCU, Austin will be Alex’s new home for the next several years as he majors in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas (UT). While he says he’ll always be a TCU fan, the possibility of working in production for UT athletics is exciting. And fans of @@APTalksSportss will be happy to know that he has no plans to slow down on his personal channel. “@@APTalksSportss is always something that will exist,” said the aspiring filmmaker. He added that he’d be interested in trying out different formats, like interviews, podcasts, or long-form journalism that goes deeper into specific sports opinions he’s very passionate about.
While most sports commentators maintain an air of smug omniscience, Alex likes to find creators with a similar humility who are more specialized in their fields to learn as much as he can from them before passing that knowledge on to his followers. He said, “I’m decent at predicting fight outcomes,” when asked about prognostications. “But I’m famously bad at picking college football games, though I’ve been approached about sponsorship from betting sites.” He shuddered in a way that signaled that gambling advice or advertisement would be counter to the culture he’s worked hard to create and preserve.
“I did convince my group to stay at the Alamo Bowl; that might go down as my best prediction ever,” he said, smiling while recalling TCU’s famous 31-7 halftime deficit against Oregon in the 2016 Alamo Bowl. The group of friends he traveled with was eager to walk back to their hotel to beat the room-service cutoff and order dessert, but he convinced them they should wait and watch some of the third quarter. Of course, this game will go down as one of the largest bowl comebacks of all time, so perhaps he’s not as bad at predictions as he claims.
Alex sees himself as a storyteller – as most great teachers do – and as a filmmaker who really enjoys sports. Enrolling at UT represents what he felt was the best way to continue that passion. In addition to UT, Alex was accepted at both Texas A&M and New York University, though NYU’s offer wasn’t for film, so it wasn’t nearly as alluring as UT’s. He sees his professional future more as a producer than as an on-screen talent, though he clearly possesses the capacity for both, even though he spends the lion’s share of his time working on the former in his bedroom.
At a time when many people dismiss social media as a lot of sound and fury that ultimately signifies nothing, a young person is condensing information he’s passionate about into entertaining vignettes to entertain, spark curiosity, and express himself artistically. Because after all, teaching – at least when it’s done well – is an art. @APTalksSports serves as both a resource for a non-sporting demographic and a as useful example for people in our lives, or those we parent, who might have misconceptions about the tenacity and work ethic of the influencers and social media personalities we follow. Alex should also serve as a reminder that supporting our creative outlets can, and often will, lead to valuable personal growth, and maybe even grow into something else tremendously worthwhile.
So, if you need something to discuss with that coworker who always seems to have opinions-with-a-capital-O about sports, or you’re searching for an icebreaker when you’re in the stands at your kids’ game pretending to know what’s going on, drop @@APTalksSportss a follow to begin taking your survey of sport with Alex. You will probably learn something, and you will definitely be entertained.
