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Despite being formally all-gender, children’s baseball in Canada and the United States remains highly male dominated. We draw on the autoethnographic fieldwork of Travers as a queer/trans volunteer coach to demonstrate the social processes that reproduce male domination among coaches in children’s baseball. We employ the theoretical lens of doing/redoing/undoing gender to demonstrate the enactment of a hybrid form of masculinity we term “Good Dad Masculinity.” Good Dad Masculinity reproduces male domination in children’s baseball as a de facto highly gendered organization wherein girls, women, and nonnormatively gendered people of all ages are peripherally included, at best. As Good Dad Masculinity reproduces male domination while appearing to embody and endorse gender egalitarianism, resistance to it is akin to wrestling with jello.

For 25 years, the Beardy’s Blackhawks were Canada’s only U18 AAA hockey team located on and operated by a First Nation. The team encouraged young, Indigenous athletes to take pride in their cultural heritage and offered a sense of belonging and acceptance while also providing an opportunity for non-Indigenous players to play in such an environment. In 2019, the Saskatchewan Hockey Association made the decision to eliminate the Blackhawks from the league, describing their removal as a need to address “league concerns” related to billeting and younger player development. The purpose of this article is to analyze differences in how opportunity is understood and experienced by final-roster players (2019/2020 hockey season) and past alumni and, particularly, how it diverged across racial and cultural axes. What is found through semistructured interviews is that the concept of opportunity shifts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous players: Whereas Indigenous players tend to view opportunity in relation to cultural pride, non-Indigenous players view opportunity primarily in relation to future hockey opportunities. We argue that specific elite sporting opportunities that are characterized by Indigenous values are needed for a greater and more diverse range of Indigenous athletes to succeed in elite sport.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 Calls to Action identified societal measures necessary for a successful reconciliation process between Indigenous peoples and settlers in Canada, five of which were specific to sport. Half a decade after the Calls to Action were published, the response by national sport organizations in Canada has escaped scholarly attention. Through a lens informed by settler colonial studies, the authors employed summative content analysis to examine the ways, if any, in which national sport organizations in Canada have implemented relevant Calls to Action. The results indicate a lack of response by most national sport organizations which, we argue, represents settler silence.

Despite the growing body of feminist research investigating the relationship between sports initiatives and gender development goals, the literature to date has almost exclusively focused on female participation within sport for development programs. The purpose of this paper is to examine men’s behavior and provide novel insights into the perspectives and roles of men in sport for development work. This paper draws upon 11 months of ethnographic research undertaken between 2017 and 2018 in two organizations in São Paulo, Brazil, which use football as a tool to empower women. The findings reveal the diversity of roles men play in gender equality efforts and indicate issues men face, specifically the impact of ideas of manhood that hinder their ability to support broader social justice. The author ends the paper by outlining the necessity to explore masculinity and manhood in more depth to broaden the current understandings of the limitations and potential of sport for development initiatives to change the traditional model of male dominance and, consequently, have a more profound effect on gender equality.

Drawing on data from a qualitative study of sponsored and professional female climbers, this article offers a timely examination of the digital labor undertaken by women seeking to forge identities and livelihoods in sport. Female climbers are increasingly turning to social media to generate visibility and sponsorship opportunities in response to the changing social and commercial imperatives of sport, yet the perspective of participants is lacking in existing academic research. The theoretical framework of “athletic labor of femininity” is deployed to explore sportswomen’s decision making when producing social media content. This study departs from previous investigations by considering the sociotechnical aspects of platform algorithms in female climbers’ efforts to remain visible online, and attempts to avoid controversy that can deter followers.

This article examines an area that has received surprisingly little attention within the sociology of sport literature: the role of human movement and the ways in which it can be understood and valued. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, in this article, the authors have raised the possibility of sporting “movement capital.” The authors argued that rules and regulations produce and legitimize particular types of movements, which are then reinforced through institutionalized athlete development practices and able to be converted to symbolic capital. However, movements might also be valued as demonstrating particular traits and/or invoking emotional reactions, and be recognized as familiar. The authors concluded that, through identifying the connections between Bourdieu’s habitus and Butler’s performativity, they can understand how the value of movement is constantly in-flux, constantly regenerating as athletes imperfectly produce and reproduce recognizable movements as part of their sporting habitus.

Rugby has traditionally existed as a leading definer of masculinity in British culture, which has included overt homophobia. However, cultural attitudes toward homosexuality have improved rapidly in the 21st century. To assess the impact of wider societal change on gay rugby teams, we employed a multiple methods investigation across five gay rugby teams in England. Results show that, whereas athletes once played for these teams to escape homophobia in broader rugby culture, this is no longer true. Affiliation with gay clubs is now primarily for social purposes, and gay rugby clubs now protect the physical safety of gay men from being less prepared to play the game, whereas before it was safety from homophobia. This research shows that gay rugby clubs have undergone an organizational shift in response to the increased social acceptance of sexual minorities.

College football programs invest millions of dollars into recruiting top high school prospects. This recruiting process is covered extensively by reporters from sports media outlets. While the players being recruited are predominately Black, the sports media is disproportionately dominated by White men. In this context, the current study reports on data from interviews with 15 participants who work in the college football recruiting media industry. While some participants adopted a color-blind perspective dominated by a belief that racism no longer exists, most reporters expressed an awareness of racial stereotypes in the sports media and felt a need to address racial inequity. Such awareness presents an opportunity for anti-racist training that may help media members avoid racial stereotyping and address racism in the field.