For many local residents, the initials “NSSA” don’t automatically connect with the wide world of sports and the journalists who cover it. For half a century, however, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association has been a part of Salisbury and Rowan County. It’s not as widely recognized as the Bell Tower or the Plaza, but it’s nonetheless an entity more people should know about ó and take pride in the fact that it’s based here.
Raising the NSSA’s profile in the community is one of the goals of the organization’s new director, Dave Goren, who recently set up shop in its new office on North Lee Street, a few blocks from its previous site on West Innes. Along with expanding NSSA’s membership among the nation’s sports scribes and broadcasters, Goren wants to enlarge its role here in Rowan County ó a worthwhile effort that others should embrace. Salisbury has always been a hospitable host, welcoming the sports reporting tribe with open arms. Yet even those who are familiar with NSSA tend to think of it in terms of a once-a-year gathering of sports luminaries, rather than an organization that has an ongoing engagement with the community. Goren has some good ideas for strengthening that connection through activities such as charity sporting events. Since youth and sports are a natural tie-in, there’d be no shortage of possibilities for sponsoring events and programs that would help boost the NSSA’s brand here in Rowan while benefitting the community.
With promising new leadership and a new address, NSSA is in a period of transition, and it’s likely that more changes lie ahead. Currently, there’s no permanent location for the NSSA’s Hall of Fame, which has been relegated to a hallway at the Holiday Inn. Consolidating its fragmented parts under the same roof ó or at least getting them on the same block ó would help solidify the group’s identity. A better display area would help attract more visitors ó another way to connect ó and might facilitate the acquisition of other memorabilia to expand the museum displays.
Along with the community connection, the NSSA also must connect and keep pace with the rapid evolution of journalism ó or sports journalism, in this case. As its name suggests, the NSSA came into being at a time when journalism neatly fell into two categories ó the “print” people who wrote for newspapers and magazines, and the broadcast people who worked in radio or TV. Nowadays, along with sportswriters and sportscasters, we have an explosion of sports Web sites, sports bloggers, sports You-Tubers and, no doubt, sports twitterers. Accommodating to these new forms is a challenge ó but so was the once radical notion of including women in the sports media’s “good ol’ boy” fraternity, a barrier NSSA helped break by putting sportswriter Sally Jenkins into the Hall of Fame in 2005. Just as recognizing the role of women expanded the NSSA’s reach, these burgeoning digital formats offer opportunities to connect with a new generation of sports reporters.
This is a new era for the NSSA, both here in Salisbury and nationally. The goals of membership growth and greater local engagement can work hand-in-hand to expand the NSSA’s influence and make those initials a lot more familiar to a lot more people.