Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Scholarly research indicates that Black Canadian male students often use competitive sports to negotiate inequitable schooling environments and define athletic success as obtaining U.S. athletic scholarships. These Black male student-athletes also receive more social and economic supports and opportunities at all levels, which boosts athletic performance, but often at the cost of eventual poor social, economic and educational outcomes. Obscured from the narrative are the specific experiences of Black Canadian female student-athletes also engaging with sport in these ways, but with less social and economic supports and opportunities than their male counterparts. How do they navigate their athletic and academic goals? How do race, class, and gender shape their social, educational and athletic experiences? Are they successful or unsuccessful in their objectives and in which ways? Using Critical Race Theory as a conceptual frame and drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with Black Canadian female U.S. athletic scholarship recipients from the Greater Toronto Area, this paper theorizes how these athletes operate within the racialized, gendered and classed context of competitive sport. My findings explore the specific ways that these women define “making it”, the pathways to American institutions forged by these women, and the informal networks of support that facilitated their athletic and academic successes. My research contributes to a body of knowledge that currently neglects Black Canadian female athletes by elucidating how the axis of gender, intersecting with class and race, creates distinct social, athletic, and educational experiences and opportunities from those that currently dominate the Black male-centered discourse.