5 Things I've Enjoyed During my Sport Media Degree at Cardiff Met

A Cardiff Metropolitan University student shares his experience in the Sport Media degree program.

Hi, I’m Alex and I’m in my third and final year of the Sport Media BSc at Cardiff Metropolitan University. During my final year, I will join the Cardiff Met tennis team both as a player and as their Senior Media Assistant which I’m really excited for. Here’s five of my favourite things about the Sport Media BSc.

1. Vocational and practical lectures

I’ve really enjoyed the practical lectures in my first two years on the course. The practical modules have included Digital Sports Media, Sports Broadcast Journalism, and Culture, Media, and Sports Journalism. We did group tasks such as making podcasts about aspects of culture that relate to sport and creating uplifting promotional videos for a sport of our choice.

2. Tailoring work to my interests

We’re always mixing up the type of sports we’re dealing with. The lecturers are flexible and easy going with how we tailor our work to suit our interests. My main interest lies mainly with tennis and that’s what most of my work revolves around. But, the course has also allowed me to explore other sports with the freedom to experiment on them and try new things.

3. Video creation

Creating videos from scratch has been super fun. What I love about it is that at the end when your final edit is complete, you can see all the elements combining to make the full video. We’ve created videos such as news bulletins, match reports, and piece to cameras.

An aspect of these tasks that I enjoy is doing them as a team. One of us would be the camera operator, one the presenter, and one acting as the sportsperson (if we haven’t got an actual athlete). Cyncoed Campus is the perfect place for creating videos because there are endless athletes to interview and plenty of sporting locations too.

4. Podcast creation

Podcasts have become such an integral part of Sports Media. I’ve learnt how important it is to have done your research and preparation before the podcast and that during the editing process it makes all the difference to be as precise as possible and to include intro music and pre-recorded interviews. A cool part of our course in my second year was having to create our own podcast for Spotify which included designing our own thumbnail.

5. Placement modules

In the second year of the course, we undergo our placement module within one of the sports teams at Cardiff Met. My placement was working as a Media Assistant for the Cardiff Met tennis club. I am also a player for the 1st team, so it was great to be already immersed within the club. I had a lot of control over what content I created to promote the tennis club. I utilized all the skills we have learnt in other modules, such as our proficiency on photoshop and adobe rush.

I created content such as a promotional Instagram reel for our varsity match against the University of Bath, match review Instagram posts for our matches and feature videos of programs within Cardiff Met tennis. I am looking forward to progressing in this role for my final year placement where I’ll lead a small team of media assistants.