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The youth sport system in the United States is not achieving its full potential. There is a need to reimagine this system in ways that are evidence-based, innovative, and coordinated to best safeguard and promote the well-being of young people. The purpose of this expert commentary, composed by the President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition Science Board, is to propose a set of changes across multiple levels of influence (e.g., individual, family, school, organization) that could cultivate a more developmentally sound youth sport system. By advancing the vision of the National Youth Sports Strategy to provide quality youth sport to all young people in the country, these changes have substantial potential to benefit young people. [The commentary with the 2020-2021 President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition Science Board.]

The periodic examination of research agendas in sport management is necessary for the field's advancement. In this mixed-method Delphi study, 15 leading sport management scholars forecast how the field can have a more influential voice in understanding the relationship between spectator sport and population health. Panelists agreed on the importance to not oversell or oversimplify the role of spectator sport; to improve interdisciplinary collaboration, theorization, and research design; to recognize opportunities to advance mental and social well-being; to better relate to stakeholders; and to identify distinctive health effects of spectator sport. A lack of consensus existed about the relationship between spectator sport and environmental well-being and prospects for leveraging spectator sport for participant sport. Drawing from these findings, the authors suggest that future research consider moving beyond simply measuring the effects of spectator sport on population health and, instead, assess its health effects relative to multiple forms of leisure and entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the planning, design, and implementation of a culture change program in a major North American public sport organization. Using interview data from 67 participants, the authors offer a rare, in-depth account of organizational culture change and discuss in particular how the change agent in charge of the initiative was able to manage employee concerns and resistance. At the heart of this successful transformation was a careful and intentional willingness of the change agent to consistently revisit, reinforce and recommunicate culture change along with all its facets and to connect all steps of the process to the ritualistic expression of the organization's identity. This research offers a counter-perspective to technocratic imaginations of organizational culture change as neatly programmed, stepwise activity. Instead, the authors highlight the importance of attending to the continuous, local, and heterogeneous reframing activities underpinning organizational change efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an assessment of the relative influences of time spent participating in organized sports and informal sports during childhood with respect to the development of general creativity. In this study, 99 upper-division undergraduate and graduate students completed a comprehensive childhood leisure activities questionnaire and the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. According to the results of the joint generalized least-squares regression analysis, hours spent in organized sport settings was negatively related to creativity as an adult; time spent in unstructured sport settings was found to be positively related to adult creativity. The findings also point to the importance of balancing participation across organized and unstructured settings. The most creative individuals in the sample were those who spent roughly half of their sport participation time in each setting, as opposed to individuals with below-average creativity, who spent upwards of 3/4 of their sport participation time in organized settings. Therefore, fostering creative development through sport may not require a dramatic reorientation from current youth sport development models, but only a shift toward a more balanced distribution of time spent playing in both organized and unstructured settings. Future experiments are needed to test this relationship.

The interresponse-time structures of pigeon key pecking were examined under variable-ratio, variable-interval, and variable-interval plus linear feedback schedules. Whereas the variable-ratio and variable-interval plus linear feedback schedules generally resulted in a distinct group of short interresponse times and a broad distribution of longer interresponse times, the variable-interval schedules generally showed a much more continuous distribution of interresponse times. The results were taken to indicate that a log survivor analysis or double exponential fit of interresponse times may not be universally applicable to the task of demonstrating that operant behavior can be dichotomized into bouts of engagement and periods of disengagement. (Contains 8 figures and 2 tables.)

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Youth sports provides the foundation for successful dynamics and organization within a sports ecosystem. Thus, it is necessary to explore the experiences of youth who either drop out of or persist in a sport. The study's main goal is to provide empirical evidence of the validity and reliability of the modified Youth Experiences Survey for Sport (MYES-S), which assesses the personal experiences of youths in sports activities using the multidimensional Rasch model. The present study is a first-of-its-kind attempt to introduce a multidimensional Rasch measurement approach into the sports psychology field while still addressing the limitations of the classical test theory approach. A total of 1,199 athletes from ninth through 12th grade participated in the survey. The findings support a six-dimensional model of the MYES-S. The person separation reliability estimates for each dimension were close to the acceptable range. Most student-athletes' logit scores were above the range of the item endorsibilities except in cognitive skill (CS); thus, more items need to be added to better capture the youth experience in sports. Future research directions include addressing differential functioning items across gender and race groups and having more appropriate response categories. The significance of this study lies in its potential to contribute to the investigation and the calibration of the MYES-S to provide practical and meaningful guidance to sports psychology researchers and practitioners vis-à-vis the understanding of the youth sports experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The youth sport system in the United States is not achieving its full potential. There is a need to reimagine this system in ways that are evidence-based, innovative, and coordinated to best safeguard and promote the well-being of young people. The purpose of this expert commentary, composed by the President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition Science Board, is to propose a set of changes across multiple levels of influence (e.g., individual, family, school, organization) that could cultivate a more developmentally sound youth sport system. By advancing the vision of the National Youth Sports Strategy to provide quality youth sport to all young people in the country, these changes have substantial potential to benefit young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Founders of the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) set out to realize a future in which the management of sport was part of a broader vision that included exercise, dance and play. However, the organization quickly became untethered from this broad interpretation of sport management. In this mixed-method historical research and Delphi study, 10 founding members of NASSM explain the underlying reasons why NASSM leaders redirected the organization’s focus over time. Drawing from the literature on institutional legitimacy as a lens to understand the development of NASSM, the findings suggest an emphasis on commercial sport emerged over that of exercise, dance, and play. This emphasis was perceived to offer a more sustainable niche within the crowded sport and physical activity academic society continuum. Shaped by market- and culture-driven processes, NASSM’s legitimacy-seeking efforts ultimately catalyzed a narrowing of the organization’s scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth sport participation often provides the most salient forum for connecting sport with local communities. In this phenomenological examination of preteen youth sport participants, we consider the experiences and attendant meanings derived from participation in both organized and unstructured youth sport settings within a community. Phenomenology offers a paradigm for understanding youth sport participation, not in terms of the dialectical differences between the settings, but in terms of how the experiences in the different settings inform one another in the creation of meanings for participants. The analysis reveals that playing in unstructured settings actually changes the way participants think about their experiences playing organized sports (and vice versa) with both settings providing meaningful experiences capable of connecting participants to the community. Therefore, taxonomically separating the experiences engendered in the organized and unstructured settings creates a false dichotomy that fails to account for the important meanings to emerge from their synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a terrain in which gender inclusion remains a challenge: competitive esports. In the male-dominated sphere of esports, the underrepresentation of women and nonbinary people often leaves these marginalized groups invisible, with a significant lack of women and nonbinary people competing in top-tier tournaments. We highlight the experience of Wang 'BaiZe' Xinyu, a Chinese Hearthstone player who became the first woman to compete in a Hearthstone Championship Tour event in the game's 3-year history. The narrative surrounding BaiZe's participation largely focused on her gender and ignored the achievements that led her to qualify for the event. We argue that BaiZe's entrance to the championship scene was received negatively by both competitors and spectators, reinforcing barriers that exclude women and nonbinary people from entering this male-dominated space. The discrimination faced by these esports competitors reinforces sexism inherent not only in Hearthstone but also in esports in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from critical realism, institutional logics, and sensemaking, we examine how changing field level logics are encoded and enacted in organizational practice. In this paper, we make evident the problems inherent in attempting to characterize logics solely based on their observable macro-level structures and highlight in particular the challenges associated with appropriately distinguishing between final logic instantiations and the fluid processes underpinning their formulation. Consequently, we offer a meso-level explanation of how or why logics can be combined in practice. In the present case, the two prevailing logics coexisted because their respective actors encoded them in different ways and because distinctions between peripheral and central logic expectations were borne out of the process through which they were interpreted. Finally, we offer a contextualized interpretation of these enactment processes under consideration of the idiosyncratic features found in public service organizations. MAD statement This article sets out to Make a Difference (MAD) for change agents tasked with implementing complex organizational transformation initiatives. Documenting how the practical implementation of novel expectations depends on employees' personal backgrounds and histories, we challenge the applicability of one-size-fits-all approaches. We highlight instead the need to attend to the differences in change perception and interpretation that are bound to arise when diverse groups of people work in separate branches or locations of the same organization and do not share sensemaking models or meaning giving frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How predators maximize energetic gains while minimizing the costs associated with exploiting heterogeneous prey remains a difficult ecological principle to test in natural systems.Deep‐diving, air‐breathing predators face conflicting demands of oxygen conservation to extend dive time and oxygen usage from the exercise required to find and capture prey. How predators balance these opposing factors is additionally complicated by prey patches that are heterogeneous spatially, temporally and in quality.Tags deployed on foraging fin whales revealed that deeper dives consisted of higher feeding rates (lunges/hr), as generally predicted by optimal foraging theory. By simultaneously measuring prey density and distribution in the local environment, we show that whales increased their dive depths in order to forage on the densest prey patches.Despite the increased travel time needed to find deeper prey during a breath‐hold dive, the increase in feeding rates of fin whales and modelled prey consumption quadrupled compared to shallow foraging. Because the cost of transport is low at this extreme in body size, we posit that feeding on the deep prey patches significantly increases the energetic efficiency of foraging.Given the increasing recognition that anthropogenic disturbance can curtail deep foraging dives in many cetacean species, endangered fin whales may be susceptible to significant energetic losses that may impact individual fitness and population health in some areas. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has consistently revealed that team cohesion is positively related to team performance under certain conditions. In response to the need for understanding this relationship more fully, and because of the promising new insights that can be garnered with the use of social network analysis (SNA), this study employs SNA as a tool to explore a case study of the structural cohesiveness of two women's collegiate basketball teams. Members of the two teams completed online roster-based surveys related to different types of structural cohesion levels at four points during the season. This case study revealed that the higher performing team showed improved structural cohesion in the efficacy network over the four phases, and highlighted the movement of key players in the different networks (friendship, trust, advice, and efficacy) over time. These patterns demonstrate the potential for SNA to function as a diagnostic tool for organizations and researchers to generate testable hypotheses even in instances where statistical inference may be precluded by sampling constraints. In short, SNA was found to be a valuable new tool for exploring, depicting, and informing explanations about the individual relationships that impact team dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parents interact with their surrounding environment as they support their children's sport activities. Family ecological theory suggests that these interactions occur at various levels - the micro-, meso-, exo-, and macrosystems. In trying to understand how Korean immigrant parents support their children's sport participation, this study conducts in-depth interviews with a total of 17 Korean immigrant parents. This study finds that the variety of contextual factors they interact with include family, neighbourhood, school, sport organisations, work, policy and system, and cultures. The study also finds how the parents interact differently with these contexts according to their gender and children's level of sport. Free of the 'education fever' that engulfs nearly all parents in Korea, the immigrant parents found themselves at liberty to interact more actively with the values and customs of US society to support their children's sport participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes a model for reforming youth sports in the U.S. in order to reduce bias in shifting demand. It discusses the challenges facing youth sports The authors argue that helping reduce biases at the consumer landscape and advocate for the viability optional models for youth sport constitutes the fastest way toward improving system-level outcomes.

The risk of predation is often invoked as an important factor influencing the evolution of social organization in cetaceans, but little direct information is available about how these aquatic mammals respond to predators or other perceived threats. We used controlled playback experiments to examine the behavioral responses of short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) off Cape Hatteras, NC, USA, and Risso's dolphins (Grampus griseus) off the coast of Southern California, USA, to the calls of a potential predator, mammal-eating killer whales. We transmitted calls of mammal-eating killer whales, conspecifics and baleen whales to 10 pilot whales and four Risso's dolphins equipped with multi-sensor archival acoustic recording tags (DTAGs). Only playbacks of killer whale calls resulted in significant changes in tagged animal heading. The strong responses observed in both species occurred only following exposure to a subset of killer whale calls, all of which contained multiple non-linear properties. This finding suggests that these structural features of killer whale calls convey information about predatory risk to pilot whales and Risso's dolphins. The observed responses differed between the two species; pilot whales approached the sound source while Risso's dolphins fled following playbacks. These divergent responses likely reflect differences in anti-predator response mediated by the social structure of the two species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disqualification of Dancer's Image at the 1968 Kentucky Derby for the presence of a prohibited substance reveals much about the human–animal relationship. The horse was, on the one hand, depicted in anthropomorphic terms as an honourable competitor unjustly stripped of a victory. At the same time, Dancer's Image was treated as simply a piece of physical property. In short, human conceptions of domesticated animals are dichotomous in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harp seals (Pagophilus groenlandicus) have evolved life history strategies to exploit seasonal sea ice as a breeding platform. As such, individuals are prepared to deal with fluctuations in the quantity and quality of ice in their breeding areas. It remains unclear, however, how shifts in climate may affect seal populations. The present study assesses the effects of climate change on harp seals through three linked analyses. First, we tested the effects of short-term climate variability on young-of-the year harp seal mortality using a linear regression of sea ice cover in the Gulf of St. Lawrence against stranding rates of dead harp seals in the region during 1992 to 2010. A similar regression of stranding rates and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index values was also conducted. These analyses revealed negative correlations between both ice cover and NAO conditions and seal mortality, indicating that lighter ice cover and lower NAO values result in higher mortality. A retrospective cross-correlation analysis of NAO conditions and sea ice cover from 1978 to 2011 revealed that NAO-related changes in sea ice may have contributed to the depletion of seals on the east coast of Canada during 1950 to 1972, and to their recovery during 1973 to 2000. This historical retrospective also reveals opposite links between neonatal mortality in harp seals in the Northeast Atlantic and NAO phase. Finally, an assessment of the long-term trends in sea ice cover in the breeding regions of harp seals across the entire North Atlantic during 1979 through 2011 using multiple linear regression models and mixed effects linear regression models revealed that sea ice cover in all harp seal breeding regions has been declining by as much as 6 percent per decade over the time series of available satellite data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The risk of predation is often invoked as an important factor influencing the evolution of social organization in cetaceans, but little direct information is available about how these aquatic mammals respond to predators or other perceived threats. We used controlled playback experiments to examine the behavioral responses of short-finned pilot whales ( Globicephala macrorhynchus ) off Cape Hatteras, NC, USA, and Risso's dolphins ( Grampus griseus ) off the coast of Southern California, USA, to the calls of a potential predator, mammal-eating killer whales. We transmitted calls of mammal-eating killer whales, conspecifics and baleen whales to 10 pilot whales and four Risso's dolphins equipped with multi-sensor archival acoustic recording tags (DTAGs). Only playbacks of killer whale calls resulted in significant changes in tagged animal heading. The strong responses observed in both species occurred only following exposure to a subset of killer whale calls, all of which contained multiple non-linear properties. This finding suggests that these structural features of killer whale calls convey information about predatory risk to pilot whales and Risso's dolphins. The observed responses differed between the two species; pilot whales approached the sound source while Risso's dolphins fled following playbacks. These divergent responses likely reflect differences in anti-predator response mediated by the social structure of the two species., Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing or financial interests., (© 2018. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.)