In this December update, SMAANZ provides an update featuring highlights from the board, conferences, members, HDR students, and SMR. As the year comes to a close, we thank for all your support and for creating a thriving & welcoming community, and we wish you and your family a safe and happy holiday season.

Board Update

Dear SMAANZ Community,

Welcome to our last update for 2023!

  Firstly, on behalf of the board and wider membership, we provide a huge thank you to Stirling Sharpe and his team from USCRISE and the University of Canberra on the delivery of another excellent SMAANZ conference in Canberra earlier this month. As always, it was great to re-connect with, and for some meet new, colleagues in-person. For those who were able to join us in Canberra, I’m sure you will agree it was an enjoyable experience. We trust you found the conference an interesting and stimulating one, and you enjoyed both the academic and networking opportunities it provided. We also acknowledge those members who were unable to join us this year and we look forward to seeing you again soon.

With the Canberra conference delivered, we are excited to look forward to our next annual conference in Geelong in 2024, to be hosted by Deakin University. We look forward to circulating more info about what’s planned, along with the call for papers in 2024. We were also pleased to announce at the AGM that in 2025 we will be returning to New Zealand with the 2025 conference to be held in Auckland and hosted by AUT.

 As noted at the AGM, there has been a range of activities and initiatives introduced and progressed throughout 2023. Some of these include –

• Delivery of two webinars (Managing Imposter Syndrome and Burnout, Teaching Philosophies in Sport Management) which are now available as members-only resources on our website,
• Launch of the Learning and Teaching special interest group and greater visibility on our website,
• Renewed MoUs for five-years with CAUTHE and ANZALs,
• New online board portal and data storage processes, and
• Announcement of the SMAANZ Research Fellow to be launched in 2024 (more details to come early in 2024).
• We will also be meeting bi-monthly in 2024 where we will continue to progress a range of strategies, as well as continue to explore other areas to add value to our members.

I wish all our members and the wider SMAANZ community a wonderful holiday season and hope you all have a well-deserved break. We look forward to engaging with you again in 2024.

Best wishes,

Dr Ashleigh-Jane Thompson
SMAANZ President

The SMAANZ Board gathered in Canberra at the SMAANZ 2023 Closing Dinner at the National Portrait Gallery
(Missing: Sheranne Fairley)

Member Update

SMAANZ currently has 107 members, comprising 66 full memberships and 41 student members, our diverse community spans across Australia, New Zealand, and internationally. We are anticipating a surge in attendance for SMAANZ 2024 in Geelong in celebration of our 30th Anniversary. We eagerly anticipate a renewed sense of community and engagement with more on this to follow soon!

In 2023, we launched our first special interest group and teaching and learning workshops. As we look to develop member initiatives further, our feedback has highlighted a desire for research seminars, greater industry connections, enhanced journal access, increased collaboration opportunities, and a dedicated online space for HDRs to network. Our commitment to providing valuable content and opportunities for our members remains steadfast, and we are exploring ways to enhance member engagement.

Your thoughts and suggestions are always important in guiding SMAANZ and we welcome your continued input.  We encourage you to share your thoughts here.

Conference Update

SMAANZ extends heartfelt gratitude to everyone who contributed to the success of the SMAANZ 2023 Conference. Your enthusiasm, collegiality, and engagement made the event truly memorable. Special thanks to our keynote presenters, Professors Aaron CT Smith, Tracy Taylor, and Kevin Thompson, for their inspiring presentations, and to our guests from the Indigenous Marathon Foundation and Indigenous Basketball Australia, who shared their success stories during the final dinner.

Congratulations to all SMAANZ award winners:

• Alison Doherty (SMAANZ Distinguished Service Award)
• Mohsen Loghmani, Popi Sotiriadou & Jason Doyle (SMAANZ Industry Engagement Grant Winners)
• Mark Drehlich (SMAANZ 3MT Award Winner)

SMAANZ appreciates the efforts of the organizing committee, SMAANZ Board, University of Canberra partners, and other individuals who contributed to the conference's success. While many have shared feedback personally, SMAANZ invites you to participate in a short feedback survey here; allowing us to further enhance future conferences.

Deakin University is looking forward to hosting SMAANZ from December 4-6 2024 at the Geelong Waterfront Campus. The conference theme will be ‘Celebrating 30 Years of SMAANZ’ and we look forward to celebrating the achievements of the community with you all in 2024.

SMAANZ 2023 Award Winners (L to R; Alison Doherty, Mohsen Loghmani, Safeyn Mridul, Mark Drehlich & Francis O'Neill)

SMR Update

In 2023, Sport Management Review has received over 446 submissions, which is a 20% increase from 2022. This is an amazing milestone, and I thank the community of authors for making Sport Management Review your first choice. Your research and contributions drive the success of our journal and our field. This success of course brings more work! I am sure the community will join me in appreciating our dedicated Associate Editors who have taken on heavy workloads while maintaining the high standards of Sport Management Review. Of course, Editorial Board Members have also taken on much work and we appreciate them for always saying yes, taking on frequent reviews, and providing quality and timely feedback—all of these efforts are the backbone of our success. We can’t forget to thank the community of the ad hoc reviewers who consistently deliver quality and timely reviews. Your contributions too are invaluable. We also have a wonderful publishing team who work with us at Taylor and Francis, and their professionalism and work behind the scenes have been remarkable.

The success of Sport Management Review is a testament to the strength and support of our incredible community. Together, through Sport Management Review we continue to elevate the field of sport management, and we will continue to recognise this as we celebrate 30 years of our community in 2024.

From a journal operations perspective, not only have we processed a record number of submissions in 2023, but we fixed the highlights, refined instructions to authors, refined feedback to authors, published a special section recognising 25 years of the journal, revised editorial policy and operating codes, banished plastic wrap on the few printed copied that are distributed, assured our COPE membership and established a LinkedIn page. We ask you to follow us here.

Keep an eye out on LinkedIn for all of SMR news – including that we are changing the word count policy.

SMR Most Downloaded Articles In the Past 12 Months (from the past three years); as of November 2023

HDR Student Update

Throughout 2023 the SMAANZ HDRs have been busy with all things HDR. The Mid-year HDR Conference hosted by RMIT University had a great turnout out learning from industry professionals on how to make themselves and research show stoppable, whilst also hearing from senior academics on how to combat imposter syndrome when engaged in research. Many of our HDRs took the opportunity to showcase their research journeys and how their research was progressing to date with the day progressing to a social event to engage with senior academics in the sport management field.

Similarly, our HDR day at the annual conference in Canberra was a huge success. Students gathered from all over the globe to engage with key events throughout the day such as a panel on ‘The future of AI in academia’, a Teaching and Learning workshop to develop their teaching philosophies and a Hackathon with one of the conference partners, The Brumbies. Feedback from the community enjoyed the engagement with the industry with expressions for more into the future.

Next year we hope to have more success and grow our SMAANZ HDR Community even more alongside exciting plans for the year ahead. I’d like to wish all of our HDRs an enjoyable holiday and I look forward to seeing all your successes in the year ahead.

SMAANZ 2023 Hackathon Winners with the ACT Brumbies at SMAANZ 2023 HDR Day