Sports Volunteering on University-Led Outreach Projects: A Space for Developing Social Capital?

The focus of this article centers around an established universities sports outreach program—the Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) project—and explores how its core workforce, student volunteers, perceive that they develop effective working relationships with the project’s “hard-to-reach” clients. The SUNEE project represents an alliance between the region’s five universities to tackle social exclusion, and promote and nurture social capital and civil responsibility through the vehicle of sports. This joined-up approach to sports development provides the region’s student volunteers with vast opportunities to gain both experience and qualifications as sports coaches, mentors, and leaders by working with a range of hard-to-reach groups. To explore how the dynamics of the project influenced relationship statuses between SUNEE’s diverse participants, from the perspective of the student volunteers, this article draws upon Robert Putnam’s notion of social capital to interpret the experiences of the study’s percipients (n = 40). Captured using semi-structured interviews, students indicate that over the course of their participation in the project, social capital served both exclusionary and integrative functions, yet as time elapsed, social capital was increasingly generated between SUNEE’s diverse participants, playing a crucial role in bringing both volunteers and hard-to-reach clients together

They do treat us as a bit normal now”: students’ experiences of liminality and communitas whilst volunteering on a sports-based outreach project.

Student volunteering during university has been widely championed for its purported benefits to both students and society alike. Internationally, universities have increasingly coupled student volunteering opportunities or embedded forms of service learning with sport-for-development programmes (SFD) as a means of contributing to strategic institutional objectives. However, there is a paucity of academic research that documents the social processes experienced by students as they converge with hard-to-reach client groups when volunteering on university-led SFD platforms. Therefore, and utilising data captured from semi-structured interviews (n=40), this article explores the lived experiences of undergraduate students who volunteered on a sports-based community outreach project: The Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) project. Largely run by student volunteers, the SUNEE project delivers a raft of sports-based and personal development programmes to hard-to-reach groups. This article utilises Victor Turner’s (1969) concepts of liminality and communitas to illustrate the processes of initiation and integration that confer both membership upon student volunteers as well as their legitimacy as leaders, when working with the hard-to-reach clientele on the project

“They need to learn to take it on the chin”: Exploring the emotional labour of student volunteers in a sports-based outreach project in the North East of England.

There is a paucity of research that explores the emotional statuses of those preparing themselves for the world of work and who are currently going through the higher education system. This research contributes to this knowledge gap by exploring the emotional labour of university students whilst volunteering on the Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) sports-based outreach project. Using data from semi-structured interviews with students (n=40) this paper draws on the work of Arlie Hochschild (1983, 2012) on emotion management to explore the feeling, display and regulation of emotion by this cohort of volunteers throughout their involvement on the SUNEE project. The findings suggest that students’ emotional labour is influenced by a variety of challenging attitudes and situations that they encounter when attempting to coach “hard to reach” groups. To perform such emotional labour, students often chose to transmute emotion, separating their actual emotions from their outward display to convey a demeanour necessitated by the perceived feeling rules of the coaching context

Navigating Austerity: Balancing ‘Desirability with Viability’ in a Third Sector Disability Sports Organisation.

Research Question Adopting a case study approach, this article draws upon resource dependence theory (RDT) to examine the impact of austerity upon a third sector sport organisation (TSSO) that specialises in delivering disability sport provision in Liverpool, England. Research Methods In-depth qualitative data was collected from 15 semi-structured interviews with senior officials belonging to the TSSO. Data were thematically analysed to explore stakeholders’ perspectives of how the wider fiscal environment has affected the organisation and how such impacts have been managed. Results and Findings The findings illustrate the financial challenges faced by the TSSO as a consequence of reductions in available funding. The article then demonstrates how the TSSO manages resources to weather such financial challenges and attempt to grow its delivery capability through partnership and network development. Implications This article identifies the implications imposed upon the TSSO in a time of austerity and explores, using an RDT lens, the management and growth strategies employed by the organisation to navigate these complex circumstances without compromising a steadfast commitment to its mission values

Helping them to help themselves? An evaluation of student-led tutorials in a Higher Education setting

This article delivers an evaluation of a pedagogical intervention implemented within a first-year undergraduate university module. The intervention, termed the student-led tutorial (SLT), is based on the concept of the tutorless tutorial and presents a platform for student learning which was designed to increase active learning prior to their participation in more traditional and tutor-led modes of university teaching. To evaluate the efficacy of this method, a mixed-methods approach to the data collection was undertaken. The sample for the study was drawn from students enrolled on a Sport Development degree programme at a university in the North West of England. The first component of this methodological approach entailed the repeat completion of a questionnaire by 62 first-year undergraduate students on two separate occasions. The questionnaire was administered in two phases: a baseline wave at the beginning of a core module and a secondary wave 16 weeks later. In addition to this, a focus group consisting of five students was conducted within two weeks of the second round of questionnaires to gain a more in-depth understanding of students’ experiences and perceptions of the SLT model. The findings demonstrate that SLTs hold the potential to facilitate active learning and aid comprehension and understanding. Students particularly value the social aspect of the SLTs, which enables extended peer-to-peer interaction. The data suggests that students develop a sense of responsibility for and ownership of their learning, yet for the SLT mechanism to be effective, all members of the group must buy-in to the concept. Where commitment and contributions to the group process are uneven and inequitable, resentment and discord within an SLT may be fomented

Chasing a Tiger in a network society? Hull City’s proposed name change in the pursuit of China and East Asia’s new middle class consumers

The English Premier League possesses multiple global dimensions, including its clubs’ economic ownership, player recruitment patterns and television broadcasts of its matches. The owner of Hull City Association Football Club’s economic rights, Dr Assam Allam, announced plans to re-name the club ‘Hull City Tigers’ in an attempt to re-orientate the club towards seemingly lucrative East Asian, and specifically Chinese, markets in 2013. This article, first, draws upon Manuel Castells’ work in The Rise of the Network Society to critically discuss the logic of Hull City’s proposed reorientation to suit ‘new middle class’ consumers in China and the East Asian global region and second, uses the example to theoretically engage with Castells’ idea that ‘networks’ replace ‘hierarchies’ as social structures. This leads to the argument that while these plans might intend to strengthen the club’s financial position, they overlook a concern with local environments that Castells guides us toward. By looking toward the local consumer practices in China and the East Asian global region, Allam would find: (a) the normalisation in production and consumption of counterfeit club-branded sportswear and television broadcasts which makes increasing the club’s revenues difficult; and (b) that the region’s ‘new middle classes’ (marked by disposable income) are unlikely to foster support for Hull City, even if ‘Tigers’ is added to its name

'Sinking and swimming in disability coaching': an autoethnographic account of coaching in a new context

In terms of achieving wider health and social outcomes, sport coaching promises much for young people with disabilities. Despite this promise, the experiences and practices of those coaches who enter the disability sport arena are underexplored. This is particularly so for coaches who operate in community participation rather than competitive elite environments. Accordingly, this paper uses an autoethnographic approach to explore the experiences of a basketball coach (Colum), who enters a youth club for disabled participants for the first time. Utilising observational data, reflective field notes, and interviews, five relativist vignettes are collaboratively constructed to represent Colum’s (a pseudonym) experiences across 12 basketball sessions. The vignettes reveal that the disability and community context disrupted Colum’s normative coaching behaviours. An emotional laborious journey is recounted that includes significant lessons, which may impact coaching practitioners, researchers and sport development officers. In addition, the post-sport context (Atkinson, 2010a) is introduced to differentiate the youth club context from Colum’s normative sport context. Furthermore, the concepts of liminality and ludic, which are novel to extant coaching literature, are introduced to explain how and why Colum struggled to find structure within the context of a youth club for disabled participants

An analysis of third sector sport organisations in an era of ‘super-austerity’

This article investigates the impacts of ‘super-austerity’ upon sport-focussed third-sector sport organisations (TSSOs) in England and how they negotiate the implications of an increasingly constrained fiscal climate. Set against the backdrop of the recent election of the Conservative government (in 2015), the research explores the relationship of these TSSOs to both local and central government. To do this, the authors draw upon semi-structured interviews undertaken with the chief executive officers/managers of 14 TSSOs of varying size and scope. The article reports how TSSOs have acted to negotiate the advances of ‘super-austerity’ and move to obtain resource sufficiency. The findings also offer an insight into how sustained government spending cuts and a concomitant residual commitment of local authorities to sport are shaping not only TSSOs relationships with the public sector but also with each other. The article discusses the role of sport in the overall function and remit of the TSSOs that comprise the sample as the sector adapts to compliment a ‘smarter’ state

Building an inclusive cycling "movement": Exploring the charity-led mobilisation of recreational cycling in communities across Merseyside, England.

This article examines the charity-led implementation of an inclusive cycling programme across Merseyside in the North West of England. The project itself is delivered via a network of cycling 'hubs' that the charity has set up and run typically in deprived communities. Using resource mobilisation theory (RMT), the article specifically examines how the Cycling Projects charity mobilises a raft of diverse resources from the financial to the human, and from the cultural to the physical, to drive and sustain its Pedal Away product. To do this, the article utilises qualitative data captured from 15 in-depth semistructured interviews undertaken with stakeholders both internal and external to the charity, as well as focus group data yielded from programme participants (n=32). The findings illustrate how the charity is able to garner and exchange resources from its partners and funders, and the ways in which it mobilises both participants and personnel from within the communities it serves. As an original contribution to the sport management field, this article demonstrates both the value and applicability of RMT as a theoretical framework by which to understand how a non-profit organisation derives the resources it requires in order to deliver a network of community embedded recreational cycling programmes

The framed and contested meanings of sport mega-event 'legacies': a case study of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games

This article examines the ways in which envisioned sport mega-event legacies are publicly framed, communicated and contested. By employing Bourdieusian field theory, the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games (CWG) as a case, and drawing upon documentary and media analysis, this article questions how CWG 2022 legacies were framed in a pre-event context. The article makes two key arguments. First, dominant actors within the mega-event field framed a considerable part of their pre-event legacies in terms of intangible inclusivity legacies relating to the host city's local communities, workforce and volunteering practices. Second, alongside these framed legacies, counterclaims emerged from actors on a civil society level, illustrative of a wider scepticism toward mega-events’ effects in the present day. Whilst limited scholarship has examined CWG 2022 to date, this paper also advances scholarship on sport mega-events’ socio-political legacies whilst it, theoretically, unpacks Bourdieu's tools of ‘field’ and ‘doxa’ in a new context