Roles and Reflections (Asynchronous Session)
Female Wrestlers: Grappling the Head Locks of Oppression View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Terri Cecchine
This study investigates the relationship between female athletes and their coaches. In particular, this study focuses on the perceptions of both coaches and athletes of Title IX and the treatment and experiences of females participating in male dominated sports. Seventy-Eight female high school wrestlers (mean age 16), were interviewed and surveyed about their thoughts and feelings of participating in a male dominated sport and how that experience shaped their thoughts of self. In addition, seven high school wrestling coaches from seven different schools were interviewed about their perspective of women in the sport, how has it changed over the last ten years, as well as how women are gaining accessibility and adding advantages to a traditionally, and physically male sport. Findings indicate that through battling male dominance and remaining persistent through physical pain and social oppression, women are creating a new idea of what it means to be an athletic woman, and what it means to be both mentally and physically strong. Implications from this study can provide coaches with a better understanding of how to approach the increasing number of female athletes. This is especially critical in the realm of physical sports, where women are carving out a space of their own as the mixed martial arts are gaining popularity.
From White Trash to Tattooed Prince: Reinventing the Australian Football League’s Dusty Martin View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tom F Heenan, Julie-Ann C Tullberg
Australian rules footballer Dustin Martin has become one of Australian sport’s most marketable commodities. From a supposedly poor, white rural family, Martin was initially portrayed as a footballing outlier. A former bike gang member's son, Martin’s early career was tainted with scandal and indiscretions. The heavily tattooed Martin was viewed as football’s wild child with a checkered past; a high school drop-out from rural struggle-town, lacking social skills and elite athlete behaviours. This changed in 2017 when Martin won the coveted Brownlow and Norm Smith medals, and was pivotal in Richmond’s premiership success. As the season progressed, a marked shift occurred in media representations of Martin. He was no longer football’s reclusive problem child, but its tattooed prince, celebrated for his on-field exploits, off-field quasi-New Age lifestyle, and loyalty to his deported father. This paper contends that the transformation was a deliberate marketing ploy to reinvent Martin as a respectable footballing role-model and to commodified his ‘rough-around-the-edges’ image. He has since promoted fashion labels and become more media-friendly about his upbringing, family background and father’s deportation. He has been instrumental in Richmond’s on-field success, and his distinctive tattooed presence has generated business for the Australian Football League. Richmond’s merchandise and membership services, and produced much media ‘oxygen.’ Drawing on strategies used to market soccer’s David Beckham, Martin’s management has exploited his football talents to create the Dusty brand. So often portrayed as the ‘White Trash’ outlier from the edge of town, Martin has been successfully reinvented as footy’s tattooed prince.
Rhythm, Emotional Energy, and Collective Identity in High School Basketball
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Isaac Kimmel
This paper uses evidence derived from participant observation of high school basketball games in Indiana to draw theoretical conclusions about the relationship between emotional energy and symbol use in the development and maintenance of collective identity. Drawing on theories of collective effervescence, symbolic interaction, and the cognitive relationship between emotion and time, it finds that high school sports provide a point of intense collective focus on both the spatial and temporal dimensions. This collective focus generates a feeling of solidarity which invests symbols both directly and tangentially related to the on-court action with emotional energy that can be drawn upon by members of the community which those symbols represent. The in-game action and the repetition of games throughout the season and seasons through the years all constitute rhythms by which the generation of emotional energy becomes self-sustaining, provided the community in which it occurs has the necessary degree of pre-existing fusion.
Golf Champions - A Study of African American Male PGA Members View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christopher Prosser, James Heimdal James Heimdal
A limited number of studies focus on African Americans playing the game of golf. Within the Professional Golfers’ Association of America, African American males make up less than a half of a percent of PGA Members. This paper investigates various barriers impacting African American male PGA members. Understanding racial marginalization in an elite-level sport may help draft new practices, policies and behaviors within the golf industry. We used semi-structured interviews (Creswell, 2013) to determine barriers of the participants’ earning membership in the Professional Golfers Association of America. Interviews were conducted with 25 African American male PGA Members. Snowball sampling was utilized to identify and invite study participants (N=25) (Patton, 2002). All participants were male PGA Members that self-identified as African American. When data analysis began, the researchers followed Creswell’s (2009) six steps of data analysis. For consistency in the analysis only one researcher conducted the interviews and coded 100% of the data and another researcher coded 50% of the data. The inter-rater reliability score was 91%. Results are still in progress, but initial findings show that participants expressed their concerns for the current path the PGA regarding diversity and inclusion. Data described African American PGA members experience racial discrimination in the form of lack of employment opportunities. Racial inequality limits types of jobs for African Americans as PGA members. In addition, study findings demonstrate the racial discrimination that exists for African American male PGA members.
What I Think, What I Feel, and What I Do: Discrepancies in Athletes' Eating Practices View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Claudia Juzwiak
State-of-the art of sports nutrition recommendations may be adapted to athletes’ individual needs. However, many studies show that athletes from different countries, ages, and sports do not consume diets in line with these recommendations. The aim of this study is to understand how the conceptions, perceptions, and meanings of food influence athletes’ food choices and eating practices. Amateur and semi-professional Brazilian (n=28) and Spanish (n=38) athletes, aged between 15 and 42 years old, from different sports (aesthetics, martial arts, and team sports) were interviewed about their conceptions of an ideal diet, the determinants of their food choices and their eating practices. Verbatim transcriptions were analyzed through the Content Analysis method. Results show that factors such as how athletes perceive themselves (identity), their performance and body goals (both athletic and sociocultural), the pleasure to eat, food beliefs, to have financial/professional support and with whom they eat (family) are important determinants of food choices and food practices leading to a discrepancy between athletes’ discourse of what they think is the ideal diet and their eating practices. The results show that to understand how athletes think and perceive food, to explore meanings, representations, and values they attribute to food, to understand how they organize information and how they apply these to their eating practices is important for the professionals who work with athletes to develop effective nutrition strategies which meet not only their physiological needs, but also the socio-cultural aspects that permeate their practices.
Between San Lorenzo and St. Peter’s: The Place of Soccer in the Theological Geography of Pope Francis View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nicholas William Howe Bukowski
This paper seeks to address the question: how is soccer part of Pope Francis’ spatial imagining of the world in his understanding of the Catholic Church’s role in society? Specifically, this paper is interested in the role of soccer in Pope Francis’ understanding of the appropriate mediums and space for the cultivation of particular forms of relationships between people derived from a theology of mutual care and interdependence. Drawing from his public declarations, speeches, and events soccer occupies an important part of both the Papacy and longer history of Pope Francis’ life in the Catholic Church. The paper seeks to argue that the value of soccer for Pope Francis is that its scalability, between the immediacy of the parish and neighbourhood club and its existence as a global phenomenon, mirrors the same desired form of scalability of Francis’ vision of the Church, similarly moving between the immediacy of the parish in a direct theology of care and as global entity with global resonance. Through soccer Francis can articulate a bridging between the care and concern for individual bodies in a parish setting as seen in the ideal of the neighbourhood club and the greater Body of Christ, the unity of a globalised Catholic laity, brought together through faith and soccer as well. Soccer existing both as guide for his desired scalability of the Church, between individual bodies and the greater Catholic global laity of the Body of Christ and as a medium for local and global connection.
Amateur Youth Basketball Players in Mexico: Human Mobility Through the Lens of Sport View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bernardo Ramirez Rios
The relationship between sports, economics, and labor is well documented throughout various academic disciplines. Migration studies, while broad, have covered numerous topics and areas. Still, as the world continues to become more connected through globalization, a focus on human mobility and the factors that impact decisions to move would contribute to the intersections of migration and athletic participation. This paper uses the culture of migration to analyze amateur athletic sports participation in the USA and Mexico. First, it demonstrates how the culture of migration influences basketball in households with a history of migration from Oaxaca, Mexico. Next, Oaxacan youths' experience offers insights into how their household creates, develops, and maintains basketball over generations within the Oaxacan communities in the USA. Finally, a critical analysis of human and athletic mobility builds on models of transnational migration to describe Oaxacan youths' exposure to basketball in the USA and the cultural factors that influence their decision to participate in an annual invitational tournament in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Athletic Identity in a Faith-based Institution View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zakary Mayo, Kyle Conkle
Sport and religion provide formative structures for youth and young adults. Literature suggests that athletic identity can be influenced in a variety of manners. Therefore, measuring athletic identity of student-athletes at a faith-based institution, could provide crucial evidence necessary to enhance the campus community experience. Researchers collected athletic identity data utilizing a modified AIMS-Plus scale. A total of 129 student-athlete responses were analyzed from a university in the Midwest region of the United States. Results suggest interesting trends when segmented by class rank and gender. This research certainly adds to the athletic identity body of knowledge, and provides greater insights to university personnel and practitioners. Additional opportunities for research are also addressed.
