Zeitökonomische Aspekte der Nachfrage nach Vereinsleichtathletik im europäischen Vergleich

In a joint project involving European association staff and sports scientists, basic structural data were collected on British, Swedish, Spanish and German athletics clubs to be used for analysis of hypotheses concerning conditions of participation in sports clubs, particularly by children and adolescents. The results showed clear differences in organizational level as well as membership and activity structures in comparisons between European countries and within Germany. The findings revealed the differential functions and significance of sports clubs in the context of the respective institutions and cultures.     

Geschichtswissenschaftliche Annäherungen an die historische Dimension des Sports

The comments in this article are designed to survey productive fields of a contemporary directed history of sport in a heuristic way. These comments represent a resolute plea for an in-depth interdisciplinary access to sport whereby in particular a hermeneutic perspective is seen as being productive. The main question on the meaning which reaches out beyond the performative completion of a sport activity contains an interdisciplinary cultural scientific programme, which must pay equal attention to the historical prerequisites of the narrative form and the medial constitution of such a generation of importance. Historians have also recently turned their attention to the cultural powers of sport. Classical questions on the functionalisation of sport by politics still attract the attention of contemporary history.     

80 Jahre vollakademische Sportlehrerausbildung

On 1 August 1929 the Prussian Minister of Education enacted a regulation establishing“exercise and physical education” as an academic field of study to be offered at all universities and institutes of technology under his jurisdiction. This action served to successfully complete the process that had been evolving since the middle of the nineteenth century to recognize the discipline as a university level specialty in the face of considerable longstanding opposition. The gravest forms of opposition emanated from the universities themselves and starting in the middle of the 1920s were ultimately overcome by proceedings and argumentation. These circumstances are described in this contribution based on accessing and evaluating new sources. The central focus is on a memorandum written in February 1929 by the Göttingen University physical education lecturer Bernhard Zimmermann. The article concludes by classifying and assessing the act of 1929 with a view to the further development of the academic education of sports instructors in the ensuing era of National Socialism and the postwar period in West Germany and the Federal Republic of Germany.     

Was macht den Sport zum Mediensport?

The popularity of sports varies to different extents around the world and leads to the question: what is a media sport? This contribution discusses definitional principles with the goal of using a model to establish the basis of categorization for future empirical analysis of diverse sports types. Media sports are defined as characteristic of movement structures in the culturally differentiated media sports complex. Features of media sports are distinguished according to the dimensions of context, organization, and (interactive) structure. It becomes clear that media sports types are not only characterized by cultural grounding, success, and charismatic stars, but can also exhibit structural distinctions. In conclusion, real, media-driven, and medial media sports are differentiated to demonstrate application of the model.     

Anthropometric characteristics of Columbia, South Carolina, youth baseball players and Dixie Youth World Series players

The purpose of this study was to compare measures of body size in two samples of youth baseball players with normative data from the United States National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) growth charts. One sample of youth baseball players participated in a local little league. The second sample of youth baseball players were members of eight of the twelve teams participating in the 1995 Dixie Youth World Series. Normative data for the United States (NCHS) were used as comparative data. Two trained anthropometrists measured standing height, sitting height, lower limb height, upper limb length, arm girth, calf girth, tricep skinfold, and abdomen skinfold on all participants. In both samples, pitchers, short stops, and first basemen were a more highly skilled group and exhibited larger body size (greater standing height, sitting height, lower limb height, upper limb length) than children who played at other positions. The standing height of local little league players was similar to the median of reference data at ages 7, 8, and 9 years. The standing height and weight of skilled players in both samples approximated the 75th percentile for standing height and weight at ages 10, 11, 12, and 13 years. The results suggest that baseball players exhibit larger body size than the normal population at young ages. Body size may be an important criterion used by coaches to select and assign young players to certain positions.     

Effect of a pedometer-based intervention on daily step counts of community-dwelling older adults

This study investigated the effect of a 12-week pedometer-based intervention on daily step counts of 147 older adults randomly assigned to an intervention or wait-list control group (M age = 72.9 years, SD = 8.8). The intervention group significantly increased their daily step counts after 12 weeks (M=639, SD=2239) and continued to significantly increase during a 12-week maintenance period (M=680, SD=1721). The control group exhibited no change during the control period (M = -393, SD=2050) but had a significant increase in daily step counts (M=1580, SD=2305) when enrolled in the intervention. The pedometer-based intervention was effective in increasing participants' daily step counts.