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Mentors for adolescents are widely believed to improve life chances and reduce problem behavior. Using 42 retrospective qualitative interviews with undergraduate former high school athletes and social learning theory as a framework, we investigate what it means to adolescents to matter to their school‐based natural mentors. Findings indicate that natural mentors represent a fundamental social connection that helped participants feel like they mattered. We identify three structural domains of social identity in which mattering operates: relationship, gender, and athletic. Natural mentoring led to connecting with non‐kin, feeling important, and creating accountability to significant others. Mentorship and mattering were deeply gendered; in reinforcing attributes of athletic success and physical or mental growth, mentor relationships both contributed to and helped subvert the structure of traditional gender roles and provide insight into the ways men and women navigate the contested and gendered space of sport. Finally, these mentoring relationships demonstrated the intersectional nature of sport and its physicality by linking the body and soul. Mattering is the mechanism for social learning that facilitates these crucial relationships. The implications of these findings are discussed, along with suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of organizational dynamics examine the manner in which an organization's immediate environment defines the "rules and requirements to which individual organizations must conform in order to receive legitimacy and support" (Scott, 1992:132). In this paper we consider the question of how an organization can achieve legitimacy and support without necessarily compromising its organizational forms or practices to isomorphic pressures. We frame the question in terms of the boundaries between organizations and their environments. Where the population ecology studies show the survival value of adopting known organizational forms and practices, and neoinstitutionalism addresses the need to display compliance with accepted forms, our case study demonstrates the possibility of removing an organization or set of organizations from the familiar interaction by naming it as a subfield of the organizational field, sharing the environment, but "out of the way" of predefined norms and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]