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Racial stacking refers to a form of racial discrimination structured within the organization of sports teams and franchises. It is a persistent and pervasive social problem. The concept, first introduced in the 1970s, documents the active process of selecting and assigning players to particular positions on the field of competition based on a players’ racial or ethnic background. The concept extends to the selection of positions of governance and oversight within sports organizations, such as coaches, managers, scouts, and front office staff. Although there has been a breadth of research on offensive and defensive positions of American football teams, no studies to date have examined Special Teams, a unit or collection of positions on a football team tasked with kicking (including field goals), punting and kick-off, and punt returns. The current study fills a gap in the literature and utilizes visual analysis of media guides and game film of all twelve football teams in the Pacific-12 intercollegiate athletic conference for three consecutive seasons (2016–2018), analyzing the racial demographics of all positions within these Special Team units. Findings from this study confirm the persistent presence of spatial centrality and racial stacking within Special Teams units of American college football, reproducing racial discrimination within college sports and American higher education today. Findings also contribute to a more nuanced understanding of figurative centrality within the racial stacking literature.

In the editorial (part one) of this special issue about nature sports (Melo, Van Rheenen, and Gammon 2019), we presented the main characteristics of nature sports and the connections between its re...

Nature sports serve as the contextual reference for this special issue. These sports, also labelled action sports, adventure sports, alternative sports, Californian sports, extreme sports, gravity ...

This paper articulates a paradigm shift in the adoption of a critical ecopedagogy focused on substantive and systemic change within nature sports. In analyzing the unifying concept of nature sports, we propose an ontological shift towards genuine sustainability, a communion among people and with nature. These activities comprise a group of physical practices that have the potential to challenge participants in novel ways that provide an alternative to traditional sports and the ideological values associated with these dominant sports, such as competition and personal gain. Nature sports inscribe meaning on bodies in motion, with a blurring or erasure of boundaries, as participants become one with nature rather than seeking to exploit or conquer it. These novel and countercultural practices promise the possibility of systemic sustainability, as participants redefine sport in terms of relational equity and ecoliteracy. As a utopian project, this systems approach recognizes the nature-sport nexus as a living framework to honor culturally appropriate practices and traditions in building an ecological movement centered on environmental justice. In this way, nature sports offer an opportunity to reimagine sustainable development through the promotion of a circular, rather than linear, economy—an economy based on re-creation rather than exploitation and waste.

Tourism in general and sport tourism in particular are growing in Brasil. This growth is due to the sheer size, diversification, and quality of the country’s vast natural resources, and also due, in part, to the organization of major sporting events in the last decade. The organization of small scale sport tourism events, such as road races is also increasing in Brasil. In this regard, this study aimed to analyze one half marathon running event – the 21 k Guaruja 2016, and examine the environmental, economic, and social impacts that occurred as a result of hosting this event. An online survey was provided to a sample of 89 participants, and 59 face-to-face surveys were applied to residents of the city of Guaruja. Two in-depth, semistructured interviews were also conducted: one to the executive director of the private company who organized the running race and; the other to a representative of the Secretariat of Tourism of Guaruja. Notably, this study has provided empirical evidence to support these events and offers a valuable tool for the sustainable development of tourism at the local and regional levels, having the capacity to create loyalty to a particular destination, as well as to reduce the negative effect of seasonality.

Sport tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors within the global tourism industry. Within this geopolitical context, small scale sport tourism events offer a wealth of opportunities for local host cities and communities. As such, many countries and municipalities within these countries want to capitalize on the local and global opportunities of sport tourism. While many of these locations are interested in the potential economic benefits of these sport tourism events, there is increased pressure on organizers and sponsors to also promote social and environmental sustainability. The aim of this book is to outline the contribution of small scale sport tourism events for local sustainable development in nine countries across three continents. The event, half marathon races, serves as the unit of analysis for comparison, as running tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors within the sport tourism industry worldwide. Findings from this comparative study reveal a collection of best practices for future planning and implementation at the intersection of small scale sport tourism and local sustainable development.

While significant efforts have been made to define the conceptual boundaries of sport tourism, less attention has been paid to designing a method of studying sport tourism events comparatively. As such, the comparative method introduced in this chapter by the International Research Network on Sport Tourism (IRNIST) helps scholars and practitioners evaluate the tripartite (e.g., economic, environmental, and social) impacts of these events on the local community. In comparing a like event across nine countries and three continents within the same year, the method and corresponding findings elucidate a more empirical way to understand similarities and differences across space, as well as to propose best practices relative to future planning and implementation. The proposed approach, while requiring further refinement, enables researchers to recognize trends and patterns of small scale sport tourism events. This comparative method also has the potential to bridge the historical divide between scholars and practitioners, encouraging applied research while building a collaborative relationship in support of economic and ethical sustainability.

Tourism is a strategic industry for the Portuguese economy, with a continual growth since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The sport tourism sector is also rapidly expanding, highlighting in particular golf, nautical sport tourism and nature sport tourism. Sporting events are also considered strategic opportunities for tourism in Portugal, especially the small scale sport tourism events, particularly, running events or races, as those who have had the greatest growth. Despite these developments, few studies have analyzed the impact of small scale sport tourism events and their potential for local sustainable development. In an effort to fill this gap in the literature, the present study focused on the III EDP Running Wonders Coimbra. An online survey was provided to a sample of 345 participants of the event. An in-depth, semi-structured interview was also conducted to the executive director of the company who organized the running race. Demographic and participation profiles of the runners, as well as, economic, environmental and sociocultural impacts were analyzed. This study concluded that, organizing such small scale sporting events on a regular basis can serve as a catalyst for local sustainable development by ensuring the use of existing resources, the involvement of the host community and a consistent flow of visitors.

Faith is the foundation of all religions. Sporting practices may be an important site for both private and public expressions or exercises of religious faith. Beyond knowing or construing a deeper meaning to life, the exercise of religious faith may likewise serve as a coping mechanism within the sports context. Specifically, religious practice may help athletes manage the uncertainty of outcome in sport, as well as their fear of sustaining a serious injury. Given the potential psychological benefit of religious faith within this context, researchers have hypothesized that college athletes would demonstrate higher levels of religious faith than other post-secondary students. The current study seeks to expand on this research, examining hypothesized differences among college athletes at a large, public Division I university on the west coast of the United States. Participants completed the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith (SCSRF)—Short Form (Plante, Vallaeys, Sherman, & Wallston, 2002), a five-item self-report measure utilized to assess strength of religious faith regardless of religious affiliation. Findings suggests that both level of athletic competition and racial identification contribute to higher levels of religious faith. That racial identity was a stronger predictor than level of athletic competition is worthy of further exploration from both a social and historical perspective.

In January 2013, the United States Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued policy guidelines to ensure that students with disabilities have equal opportunities to participate in extracurricular athletic activities in public elementary, secondary and postsecondary schools. To date, few educational institutions, particularly within higher education, have met this national need. This paper describes a pilot course offered at a large public university on the west coast of the United States that combines learning about disability studies while participating in goalball, a sport designed for individuals with visual impairments. The implementation of this pilot program highlights the challenges and opportunities for educational institutions to offer students with disabilities, particularly students with visual impairments, equal opportunities to participate in athletics. The paper envisions innovation at the intersection of sport and disability and offers a possible blueprint for other colleges and universities that seek to create similar extra or co-curricular opportunities in line with the OCR’s policy guidelines.

Each year the global tourism market records increasing numbers of international tourist arrivals, drawing attention to the negative impacts on environmental sustainability. As such, the concept of sustainability has become of paramount concern in the tourism sector over the last few decades with an emphasis on "going green" and reducing the environmental footprint associated with this growth of tourism. At the same time, tourists have become increasingly concerned about environmental issues while traveling, forcing tourism providers to carefully plan in a sustainable way. The tourism industry has accepted this trend and has applied new approaches and strategies towards environmental sustainability in their management practices. The greening of tourism began when the first ecolabel, Blue Flag, launched in France in 1985. After two years, the company expanded its activities to other European countries ; it became an international ecolabel in 2001. The idea behind ecolabelling is to help tourists make informed decision about their prospective destinations. The purpose of this paper is to explore and compare the widespread ecolabelling process in the tourism industry today. Since the first ecolabel in tourism was launched, the number of ecolabels in the tourism sector has rapidly increased in number ; today there are more than two hundred distinct ecolabels within the tourism industry. Unfortunately, there is no standardized set of criteria for certification relative to environmental sustainability practices. Given this practical issue within the global tourism industry, this research seeks to review whether the existing scholarship on sustainability and ecolabelling in tourism has informed the actual practice of ecolabel certification.

This paper conducts a systematic evaluation of one of the primary journals in the field of sport tourism research since its establishment in 1993. Drawing on extant literature with varying disciplinary approaches, this meta-review traces the development of key concepts and definitions underlying an evolving epistemology connected to sport tourism, as evidenced within the Journal of Sport & Tourism (JS&T). It does so by examining research specific to content previously unexplored. The study first conducted a content analysis based upon a keyword search, focusing on phrases in which sport and tourism appeared together. The study reviewed all texts, including articles, book chapters and editorials (n = 517), for the years 1993–2014. We then constructed a thematic analysis based upon the most common defining elements found within these texts. These extracted definitions were analyzed according to their paradigmatic elements. Based on these findings, this paper suggests the need to further define the e...

This study examines how male hegemony in team sports, such as football, promote homophobia as a form of symbolic violence and a powerful mechanism of social control. The research included the survey administration of the Attitudes Toward Gay Men (ATG) scale (Herek, 1984, 1994) to one Division I college football team on the west coast of the United States, measuring participants’ relative levels of homophobia. Findings indicate that approximately two-thirds (n=65) of the members of this college football team reported a positive attitude towards homosexuality within this study, while roughly one-third of respondents had negative attitudes toward gay men. Level of religious faith, regardless of denomination, was the best predictor of participants’ attitudes toward homosexuality. Finally, the article discusses the study’s limitations, directions for future research and implications to enhance a more open and inclusive climate within American college football.

Seasoned travellers and culturally sensitive tourists seek to blend in as citizens of the world, following a cultural code of conduct that is both respectful and responsible. Responsible travel or tourism is based on three interrelated principles when visiting a foreign land: (1) a genuine attempt to understand the host culture; (2) a respect for the people who live there; and (3) a commitment to tread lightly on the local environment (Lea, 1993; Scheyvens, 2002; Leslie, 2012). Seasoned travellers understand these qualities as an openness and opportunity to learn, embracing a position of culturally sensitive enquiry and humility. Like individual tourists who follow their own responsible code of conduct when travelling in a foreign land, companies, organizations and government agencies sponsoring tourism activities and events are increasingly held responsible for ethical behaviours. The term responsible tourism (RT) emerged in the 1980s “as a way of doing tourism planning, policy and development to ensure that benefits are optimally distributed among impacted populations, governments, tourists and investors” (Husbands and Harrison, 1996, p. 1). In addition to seeking an equitable distribution of benefits or rewards, responsible tourism likewise seeks to limit the deleterious costs associated with these positive outcomes.

Mega sporting events, such as the Olympics, are sites of political struggle. Situating mega sporting events within the context of critical social theory, this article examines the potential of modern sport to serve as a vehicle for foreign policy and the promotion of international human rights. This article examines the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games in light of Russian legislation that bans ‘propaganda of non-traditional relations’, resulting in what many have described as state-sponsored homophobia. Highlighting the international community's response to this legislation, such as threatened boycotts, political statements and symbolic gestures of protest, the implications of the Sochi case study reveal the potential of mega sporting events to advance human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens in Russia and perhaps elsewhere. As human rights are historically and culturally contested, this article discusses the role of identity politics and liberal internationalism within the realm of...

The exploitation of college athletes has been a topic of controversy within American higher education for over half of a century. Ever since the term student-athlete was coined in the 1950s (Sperber, 1999), academics and administrators have debated the extent to which the commercialization of college sports has turned college athletes into commodities, excluded from the free market while their coaches, colleges, and conferences reap huge financial rewards (Branch, 2011; Van Rheenen, 2013; Zimbalist, 1999). Especially in the revenue-generating sports of men’s basketball and football, critics have highlighted the surplus gains expropriated by colleges and universities on the backs of these young men, who are disproportionately Black (Eitzen, 2000; Hawkins, 2010; Rhoden, 2006). The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (“Are the flagship,” 2005) argued, “The case is strong that flagship universities are exploiting Blacks for their athletic talents,” by noting: “The majority of flagship state universities admit Black students who are not academically qualified . . . [and] solely for the purpose of their participation in intercollegiate athletics” (p. 2). James Duderstadt, a former college football player and President of the University of Michigan, also observed that universities “exploit” the athletic talents of college athletes “for financial gain and public visibility,” in part by “tolerating low graduation rates and meaningless degrees in majors like general studies or recreational life” (Duderstadt, 2000, p. 5-6). Even Walter Byers, who served as NCAA Executive Director from 1951 to 1987, titled his memoir Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes (Byers & Hammer, 1995), a clear indictment of modern college sports and the institutional commodification of at least some of these student athletes. To date, only a few studies (Adler & Adler, 1991; Beamon, 2008; Leonard, 1986) have explored the idea of exploitation from the perspective of college athletes, and the limitations of these reports reveal the need for a more comprehensive and comparative analysis. The proposed Perceived Exploitation of College Athletes (PECA) Questionnaire is an internally consistent three-item scale (α = .80). These three items were initially part of a seven-item index about perceived exploitation, which was one of several constructs studied in earlier papers about noncognitive predictors of academic success among college athletes (Simons & Van Rheenen, 2000) and the academic motivation of college athletes (Simons, Van Rheenen & Covington, 1999). In these studies it was found that college athletes who were more committed to their sports were also more likely to feel exploited. Additionally, the more college athletes felt exploited, the lower their university grade point averages. Utilizing this three-item exploitation scale on a sample of 581 Division I college athletes, Van Rheenen (2011) found significant differences by gender, sport, and race. Participants on the revenue-generating sports of

This paper chronicles the game preferences of American children during the twentieth century, documenting the results from four studies between 1898 and 1998. These studies are used to compare the popularity of particular activities (e.g., hopscotch, baseball) and types of activities (e.g., board games, games of individual skill) by gender over a one-hundred-year period. With this longitudinal, multistudy comparison, it is revealed that the game preferences of boys and girls have become markedly more similar. This pattern of increased play preference convergence throughout the twentieth century suggests an erosion of gender-determined institutionalized norms related to games. The dominance of electronic games and organized sport in the most recent of the four surveys not only reflects the technological advances of American society; it also indicates an increased desire for games that demand greater skill and promote role specialization.

The question of whether college athletes are exploited is regularly debated in the popular press and academic literature about college sports. The concept of exploitation, with its philosophical and psychological implications, however, is rarely discussed in detail. This paper problematizes and expands the way in which the concept has been presented within the context of college sports, arguing that exploitation is primarily a moral construct understood as an unfair exchange between two parties. For college athletes, an unfair financial exchange can be measured by comparing the surplus value and marginal revenue product. These calculations may evidence the degree of economic exploitation, but many people still believe college athletes are fairly compensated with a subsistence wage in the form of an athletic scholarship. It is more difficult to quantify the promise or value of an education above and beyond this subsistence wage, most often defined as a college degree. The over-representation of Black college athletes on revenue-producing teams, and the corresponding lower graduation rates of this population when compared to other students, highlight the racial and cultural divisions of opportunity. Institutions face a crisis of conscience when educational opportunities are offered to certain students based primarily on their athletic ability, especially when these opportunities are perceived as disingenuous due to the academic preparation and demanding athletic commitments of these recruited college athletes.

This essay juxtaposes the perceived lack of success of professional soccer in the United States with the nation’s rich history of ethnic and amateur soccer. It argues how soccer as ethnic subculture has provided a means for minority ethnic communities to construct a unique cultural identity while becoming a part of an emerging multicultural nation. In evidence of this more complex and nuanced process of cultural assimilation, the essay chronicles the rise of the Greek‐American Athletic Club in the San Francisco Soccer Football League (SFSFL), the oldest American soccer league in continuous existence. Perhaps reflective of other urban ethnic soccer clubs and the immigrant communities supporting their team, the San Francisco Greek‐Americans initially recruited players solely from their own community. Over time, however, the team began to recruit players based on their competitive potential rather than their ethnic heritage. With a mixture of non‐Greek foreign‐born and US‐born players, the San Francisco Gree...

This study of 200 Division I athletes examined the role of four noncognitive variables in predicting academic performance. Using a paper and pencil Likert scale instrument the noncognitive variables, athletic-academic commitment, feelings of being exploited, academic self-worth, self-handicapping excuses as well as several background and academic preparation variables were studied as predictors of academic performance. All four noncognitive variables were found to be significant and independent predictors of academic performance. Student athletes' relative athletic-academic identification and achievement motivation play important roles in student athletes' academic performance.