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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]

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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]

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]

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]