Sport as medicine: How F3 is building healthier men and communities

Given sport has been largely absent from U.S. public health policies and discourse, the author suggests ways that sport can be better managed to promote health. Using a critical perspective and grounded theory approach, the author examined the experiences of 14 men in the grassroots recreational program, F3. Data were collected through observation and semi-structured interviews. Based on the results, a conceptual model that suggests how sport should be managed to address illnesses related to physical inactivity is put forth. The resulting Sport as Medicine model indicates that Creating a Team Structure, Providing a Place to Be Accountable, and Ensuring No One is Left Out, led to meaningful Health Outcomes, including Physical Health, Mental Toughness, and Social Connections. As the distinctiveness of sport continues to emerge, the author provides a framework to consider how sport can be part of public health efforts to address physical inactivity. Thus, this work positions sport as medicine by pinpointing how sport can be managed so that holistic health outcomes are more likely achieved.     

Indigenous Australian women promoting health through sport

The authors explore the sporting experiences and community strengths of Indigenous Australian women. The intention is to inform both health promotion and contemporary sport management strategies, and policies and practices, leading to better health outcomes for this cohort. The authors employ an interpretative qualitative methodology, which involves the combination of data from a range of sources, including interviews and focus groups with 22 Indigenous women living in urban and rural areas, narratives from elite Indigenous athletes and coaches, as well as findings from a recent Australian Parliamentary inquiry into Indigenous health and wellbeing. Drawing from an agency/empowerment theoretical framework, the authors posit that, given support and opportunities, Indigenous women can become empowered to improve their mental and physical health through participation in sport. Sport managers can facilitate Indigenous women's agency in the effects of colonisation, which continues to be the basis of health issues for this cohort. Listening to Indigenous women and facilitating opportunities for them to take control of their own participation can help facilitate this process. Indigenous-women's only opportunities, partnerships with health agencies and sports organisations, culturally safe spaces and Indigenous women acting as role models are some factors that may augment Indigenous women's agency, and thus empowerment. Government, sports, community organisations and health agencies which provide these conditions in their program design can help to overcome entrenched social, historical and health inequalities that Indigenous women may experience.     

Managing sport volunteers with a disability: Human resource management implications

Despite the known benefits of volunteering–such as helping others, contributing to community and the development of skills–individuals with a disability are underrepresented in volunteering roles. In this research, the authors examine the benefits and barriers to including volunteers with a disability in three Australian sport and recreation organisations, as well as the potential human resource management implications. The authors take a multi-level perspective and draw on interviews with sport volunteers with a disability, staff from sport organisations, and recipients of services from volunteers with a disability conducted in 2016–2017. Researchers have not previously examined these diverse perspectives, but they are important for understanding how to include and support sport volunteers with a disability. Analysis of the interviews revealed a wide range of benefits of including volunteers with a disability including social acceptance, social inclusion and personal development; but both volunteers and organisations identified numerous barriers to volunteering, including negative attitudes, personal factors, organisational factors and lack of social inclusion. Based on the results of this study, the authors develop recommendations for human resource management practices and policies to support volunteers with a disability in sport and recreation organisations, which are organised around an ability-motivation-opportunity framework. The results suggest that organisations need to create an environment that facilitates open, two-way communication with volunteers with a disability about their needs and wants. There also should be training and education to all volunteers and staff around an inclusive workplace culture.     

Competition as cooperation

Games have a complex, and seemingly paradoxical structure: they are both competitive and cooperative, and the competitive element is required for the cooperative element to work out. They are mechanisms for transforming competition into cooperation. Several contemporary philosophers of sport have located the primary mechanism of conversion in the mental attitudes of the players. I argue that these views cannot capture the phenomenological complexity of game-play, nor the difficulty and moral complexity of achieving cooperation through game-play. In this paper, I present a different account of the relationship between competition and cooperation. My view is a distributed view of the conversion: success depends on a large number of features. First, the players must achieve the right motivational state: playing for the sake of the struggle, rather than to win. Second, successful transformation depends on a large number of extra-mental features, including good game design, and social and institutional features.     

Tinkering through transition: on ‘doctoring’ as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy

This article addresses the notion of ‘making it’ as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy. In it, we draw on the tradition of material semiotics to reflect on our shared journeys from doctoral student to beginning scholar and beyond. By attuning ourselves to the relationality, materiality and precariousness of our experiences, we offer an answer to the question of what it takes to ‘make it’ as an early-career academic by advocating the practice of ‘making do’ or ‘doctoring.’ We develop this argument, first, by describing the narrative methods we used to conduct our inquiry and by explaining the material-semiotic ideas we used to explore the stories it generated. Then, we tell tales of our transitions from higher degree research student to early-career academic, focusing specifically on our ongoing, collective efforts to make do. In our discussion, we explore these narratives and attend to three features of our actions and activities as early-career academics; namely semiotic relationality, material heterogeneity and the precarious processes of heterogeneous engineering through which we sought to make a career in our field. We conclude by encouraging beginning scholars in physical education and sport pedagogy to become sensitive to these aspects of their own agency, and to experiment, experience and tinker together in ways that are attentive, inventive, caring and persistent.     

The experience of watching baseball games in Korea: an analysis of user-generated content on social media using Leximancer

The current study explores international tourists’ experiences of watching professional baseball games in Korea. Total 152 reviews posted by tourists on TripAdvisor were analyzed through Leximancer, a computer program used in the qualitative content analysis. The software identified three dominant themes of tourist experiences: the distinctive atmosphere of Korean professional baseball games, the diverse services in the stadium, and fanatical cheering behavior for the team. Moreover, it revealed that international tourists were generally positive toward the culturally distinctive style of Korean professional baseball games. This study suggests that the professional sports of a travel destination can be a form of providing international tourists with pleasurable experiences and a way to learn about the distinctive Korean baseball culture.     

A Hole in One: Sport and Environment

Abstract

Sport history is a subfield well positioned to involve and benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to historical actors and spaces. Through the use of personal research and teaching experiences that focuses on the intersection between environmental history and those of sport, this piece explores the value in such an interdisciplinary structure through the examples of researching golf courses as transnational sporting landscapes and of teaching sport and leisure cultures to a diverse student body with high levels of engagement.     

Girls’ bodily activities in physical education How current fitness and sport discourses influence girls’ identity construction

Girls’ identity constructions are influenced by the dominant sport, health and beauty discourses in their society. Recent research indicates that sport and health discourses embedded in physical education (PE) compete for influence. Some of these studies have illustrated how these discourses inform girls’ social construction of body ideals and femininities, as well as their choices among physical activities. Our purpose in posing the question, ‘How are girls’ identity construction in PE influenced by current fitness and sport discourses?’ is to explore their identity construction and how they negotiate within the PE discourse as embodied subjects, as well as how they use their body as an object of display. This study is based on fieldwork among 10th grade students (15-year-olds) in a school in Oslo, Norway. The methods used include participant observation, informal conversations with the students and two group interviews. We hope that our findings concerning how sport and fitness discourses influence the students’ concepts of both the ideal body and their choices among bodily activities in PE will contribute to the debate on the future of PE. In particular, the girls’ embrace of the fitness discourse in PE is relevant to a question of great current concern: How should schools and PE teachers meet and relate to the fitness discourse in contemporary society? We believe that if left unchallenged and permitted to deepen its influence on PE, this discourse may well ensure that body modification becomes the primary purpose of PE.     

运动训练学研究领域的回顾与展望——基于《天津体育学院学报》创刊30年来的文本研究

采用文献法与文本研究对《天津体育学院学报》自创刊30年来所刊发与运动训练学专业领域相关的692篇论文进行梳理,评述运动训练学专业研究领域的发展进程与未来走向,论述典型研究成果的学术价值和实践意义,研讨我国运动训练学的专业建设与发展模式,旨在为专业人士提供一定的借鉴,提升运动训练学专业的学术影响力。     

全国性单项运动协会市场开发现状调查与筹资机制研究

在对我国全国性单项运动协会市场开发的现状调查的基础上,探讨协会多元化筹资机制的实现途径.研究发现,对无形资产的开发已经成为或正在成为许多协会除政府拨款外最主要的收入来源,同时,单项运动协会在市场开发方面也面临诸如内容还相对单一等问题.研究认为,不同的单项协会其筹资机制应该有不同的实现形式:以职业联赛为核心的市场化运作模式;难以实行职业化,但能够主要依托社会化和市场化运作的筹资模式;政府拨款为主的运作模式;以及政府投入与市场化运作相结合的筹资模式.要建立符合中国社会经济发展阶段和体育运动发展规律的有中国特色的单项运动协会多元化筹资机制,根本途径在于进一步深化单项运动协会实体化改革,深入推动单项运动协会的社会化和市场化.据此提出了具体的对策建议.