Gun Violence, eSports, and Global Crises: A Proposed Model for Sport Crisis Communication Practitioners

Abstract

On Sunday, August 26, 2018 an eSport gamer killed two competitors and injured 10 others in Jacksonville, FL. at the Madden 19 Southeast Qualifier, a competition sanctioned by the Madden Championship Series. The shooting, live-streamed to thousands of fans watching on Twitch, stands as the first mass shooting to occur at a professional sporting event. Due to the changing complexity of sports crises, and the ever-increasing power of sport organizations, the authors of this paper argue that sport communication practitioners and managers need explicit guidance for how to act in crisis situations, especially as research shows that sport crisis managers are overwhelmingly underprepared. The authors, therefore, propose a visual step-by-step model based off of Coombs’s (2007b) Situational Crisis Communication Theory that lowers barriers to entry for sport communication practitioners to effectively implement a crisis response even when they have little knowledge of the theory.

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