This year’s NBA Finals are underway, along with the end-of-season accolades, both of which sport a very global face for today’s NBA workforce is truly international. By January 2023, nearly one in three players were born outside of the United States. It’s a trend that accelerated significantly as the first generation inspired by the U.S. Dream team crafted careers in the NBA and showed kids back home how to spin hoop dreams into reality.

The hot topic these days in the history, sports, and communications worlds pertains to integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in writing, but recall that communication—including the communication within sports diplomacy—centers around authenticity.

France has already won at the FIFA World Cup, regardless of what happens on the pitch, for their deep run in this year's tournament reinforces the approach towards formation à la française, on producing the best quality players, not the most number of players, that has enabled this country of 67.5 million to dominate the football diplomacy stage.

What are sports without a good rivalry? Given the relatively recent rise of professional women’s football—and the even later arrival of its mediatization—what are the roles that journalists, as well as scholars, play in making and preserving great rivalries in the women’s game?

One of the things I’m greatly encouraged by is how the way we tell the stories about women’s sports is evolving. And while much of this rests on how societies are rethinking the role, import, and investment in women’s sports, it’s also highly dependent upon access: to present-day sources but also, vitally, to past accounts, statistics, and more.

How we communicate the story pertaining to issues and events in global sport shapes popular memory and sporting myths. Thus sports industry professionals, executives, investors, and the media should think more intentionally about how the ways that they tell their stories will shape, constructively or negatively, the larger narrative.

The big news upon arrival in Paris last weekend was the FIBA 3X3 basketball European Cup championship, held throughout last weekend at the iconic Trocadéro, and what a vibrant vibe!

The Tokyo Games went off this summer, in spite of host Japan’s pandemic-induced state of emergency. I was all-in on the basketball tournaments – both the classic 5X5 and inaugural 3X3 men’s and women’s versions — as well as these other key storylines.