“What if they need to block her on a kick return?”: media framing and self-representation of Sarah Fuller’s historic season as a Vanderbilt soccer player and football kicker

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper assesses the representation and self-representation of Sarah Fuller before, during and after her historic kick for Vanderbilt’s football team in 2020. Through an analysis of 193 social media posts and 397 articles, the findings from this study demonstrate that, even in seemingly celebratory coverage of Fuller’s experiences as a football player, media members employed gendered language that “othered” Fuller in relation to her male teammates. Meanwhile, Fuller used her own social media accounts to present herself as a two-sport athlete and occasionally respond to critics. This research concludes that hegemonic themes and patterns remain prevalent in sports media coverage of women athletes. Incorporating women athletes’ voices or perspectives from their personal social media accounts more frequently in sports reporting, however, could serve as one way to increase the depth and quality of such coverage. Building on feminist sports media literature and frameworks around hegemony in sport, the results from this paper ultimately contribute to a robust field of research on women athletes’ representation in the press and on personal social media pages.