The Challenges of Team Sports
The Ethics of Athlete Violence in Team Sports
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Danny Rosenberg
Recent articles on the ethics of player violence in team sports have introduced new approaches toward clarifying and comprehending this old and vexing problem in sport. For example, White and Werntz (2017) describe and analyze the banality of violence and apply this concept to team sports wherein players have been known to engage in reckless, depraved behavior. Stolick (2017) argues from a Kantian perspective to eliminate bare-knuckle fighting in NHL hockey. The brutality observed in North American football, even when players do not intend to harm opponents, has led to such severe consequences that some claim the sport is no longer morally defensible (Kretchmar et al., 2017). Considering these themes, this proposed paper will begin by describing the meaning of in-contest player violence in team sports. It will then briefly review and critique selective works like the articles cited above. Next, the author will introduce and discuss the vulnerability principle which tries to discern violent acts from acts of violence in collision team sports (Simon et al., 2015). As will be explained, this distinction can be employed to determine ethical and unethical athlete behavior in team sports. Finally, the proposed paper will conclude by addressing athlete violence in team sports and moral progress.
How Australia’s Obsession with Overseas Sport is Starting to Hurt
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sam Duncan
For young Australian sports fans, overseas competitions such as the NBA, are now the game to watch, talk about and engage with. How has this come to be? Due to advances in technology, it has never been easier to watch sports from abroad – something commercially savvy competitions are using to tap into new markets and reach new fans. And Australians, like many others from around the world, cannot get enough of them. For example, subscription rates to the NBA’s League Pass, which enables fans to stream all games live, are higher in Australia than anywhere else on the planet. It is not just the NBA either, with the United States’ National Football League (NFL) and Britain’s English Premier League (EPL) also immensely popular in Australia. This simply puts further pressure on an already saturated Australian sports market. There are about 90 professional men’s and women’s teams competing for the attention of just 24 million Australians. Compare that with the US state of California, which has around 20 professional teams in a market of 39 million people. The rising popularity and accessibility of overseas sports has led many experts such as Andrew Condon, director of Australian sports marketing company Gemba, to state, “There’s too much content relative to our size as a country.” This paper will explore this issue in depth, highlighting the popularity of overseas sports among young Australians, while addressing what this means for Australia’s local sports teams and competitions.
Sport in Migration Stories
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Webb, Luciara Nardon
Much of the current literature in the field of sport for development (SfD) either focusses on conceptualizing sport for development or examines the agencies that operate in this sector. Through studies of SfD organizations, existing literature has provided valuable insights about the management potential, and limits, of SfD. Yet, by and large, much of the SfD research appears to neglect the idea that sport may play a role in individual or community development without much, or any, organizational involvement. One epistemic tactic for providing new insights about relationships between development and sport would be to shift the focus away from the organizations that interact with athletes and concentrate on athletes themselves. For instance, it is highly plausible that, during a migrant’s journey, there may be many circumstances where accessing organized sport may be impractical or impossible. But this paper will demonstrate that sport still plays important roles in the migrant’s lives. By examining the stories migrants tell about the journey, new perspectives on how a frequently marginalized group of individuals interact with sport will be proposed.
