Years ago, sports were big on radio and television stations. Since the era of advanced technology, sports have become big in the world of social media. Athletes from all over the world use social media including A&T’s athletes.

The Lady Aggie basketball team has taken to Travel Pod, a “blog built for travelers” to keep students and alumni informed with what is happening with the team understand the life of a player. Each week players will make a blog post about what happened during the week or what they encountered over the weekend.

The idea for the women’s basketball team to blog came from Shavon Earp, the team’s new assistant coach. “I originally took my idea of starting a blog to sports information, but the athletic website is not set up to link the two together,” said Earp.

It worked out for the best as Earp created the blog on her own. She was able to get the word out about the blog to more people through twitter. So far, there have been five blog posts from the team. Junior guard Tracy King wrote the first post with a greeting “Hello Lady Aggie Supporters,” which informed readers about the second week of the new school year, the first week of weights and conditioning, as well as the player’s season standards.

The players have a schedule of when they are to write on the blog. Not only will players be blogging, but coaches will as well. “The particular blog I chose was a travel blog that can pick up location so that when we are on the road and it is not a players week, we can post updates along with pictures,” said Earp. This week’s post will be done by Earp focusing on the big recruiting weekend they had.

Social media can be both good and bad but is a winning combination with athletes if done correctly, and the Lady Aggies are well on their way. “Social media with athletes is a great thing if used for the right reasons. There are always pros and cons, but we are using it for good to enlighten people,” said Earp.

Focused on marketing their team and showing they are more than just basketball players, their well written posts are connected to Twitter and Facebook engage socially and connect personally with students and alumni. The team has those in mind who are not on social media and have the blog posts sent to them by email.

The blog will be up all year, and with time, the team hopes to gain more followers throughout their journey as well as school support. All blog posts can be accessed from the teams twitter account @LadyAggieBall.

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• Symone Kidd, Sports Editor