Implications and opportunities for sport management education in the COVID-19 era

In December 2019, a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was detected in three patients from the city of Wuhan, China. By January 2020, COVID-19 was declared as a widespread pandemic creating a global health crisis, resulting in millions of people contracting the virus and thousands losing their lives. Alongside the wide-reaching health crisis, the impact of COVID-19 had significant economic and societal effects leaving a historical legacy which will affect countries throughout the world for considerable period of time. As COVID-19 spread around the globe the way people socialize, work, and study essentially changed forever. Therefore, this essay provides an insight into the rapid process that universities across the globe undertook to transition their teaching operations online. Projects and pedagogic reviews that traditionally would have taken months or years to devise were compressed into days, as the pandemic necessitated that traditional concerns to online teaching were cast aside. Consequently, this essay discusses these new educational platforms within sport management education and their future role in developing professionals who will be at the forefront of an unprecedented industry growth in the years and decades post COVID-19.