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This article engages Rosi Braidotti’s writing on COVID-19 and affirmative ethics to expand understandings of the purpose of leisure and physical activity in women’s lives during the pandemic. Utilizing a feminist methodology informed by an ethics of affirmation, care, and creativity, the authors share insights from in-depth interviews with five dedicated Yoga practitioners living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Herein, they reveal how Yoga’s physical, mental, and ethical practices supported women as they navigated numerous challenges during the pandemic. The authors discuss the women’s complex experiences of affect, including shared exhaustion and compassion. Finally, they illustrate how experiences of discomfort encouraged some women to rethink collective responsibility and experiment with communal solutions to better support others in the face of uncertain futures.

This article explores how White settler mountain bikers in British Columbia understand their relationship to recreational landscapes on unceded Indigenous territory. Using original qualitative research, the authors detail three rhetorical strategies settler Canadians employ to negotiate their place within geographies of belonging informed by Indigeneity and recreational colonialism: ignorance, ambivalence, and acknowledgement. In Canada’s post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission climate, the discourses settlers use to situate themselves vis-à-vis landscapes and Indigenous people contribute to the conditions of possibility for meaningful movement toward a more equitable existence for all. This work points to a growing need to problematize the seemingly apolitical landscapes of recreation as a prerequisite toward meaningful reconciliation.

This study focused on historically Black colleges and universities in men’s college basketball. A review of previous literature revealed that referee bias was a recurring phenomenon, while whiteness studies served as the theoretical frame. The data for this analysis centered on a 16-year period of time. The referees called a statistically significant number of personal fouls per game against men’s college basketball teams from historically Black colleges and universities relative to the number of personal fouls per game that referees called against men’s college basketball teams from predominantly White institutions. These findings suggest that men’s college basketball players were judged differently depending on whether the student-athlete played for a historically Black college and university or a predominantly White institution. The implications for critical and social theories were noted in the study discussion.

In 2019, the U.S. Women’s National Team earned its fourth FIFA Women’s World Cup. Has gendered commentary in media coverage about the U.S. Women’s National Team changed since winning their first World Cup 20 years ago? Drawing on 188 newspaper articles published in three U.S. newspapers in 2019, the analyses contrast media representations of the 2019 team with a previous study focused on coverage of the 1999 team. Our analysis shows important shifts in the coverage over time. The 1999 team was popular because of their contradictory femininity in which they were “strong-yet-soft.” By 2019, the team’s popularity was rooted in their talent, hard work, success, and refusal to be silent about persisting gender-based disparities in sport and the larger society.

Using descriptive and multiple regression analyses of data from the National Sports and Society Survey (N = 3,993), this study examines public opinions about athletes’ right to protest during the national anthem. Results suggest that public opinion is now more supportive of athletes being allowed to protest during the anthem, although considerable opposition persists. Black individuals and those who recognize racial/ethnic discrimination in society are especially likely to support athletes’ right to protest. Heterosexual, Christian, sports fan, and military identities seem to encourage opposition to the right to protest. Indicators of traditionalism and sports nationalism attitudes are also negatively associated with support for athlete protests.

Safe space—a physical and psychosocial space cultivated through social relations—can be vital for youth programs and community development. This paper analyzes youth participants’ experiences in a Canadian bicycle program. The authors suggest that the program can be seen as a form of “Sport for Development,” and specifically what the authors term “Bicycles for Development”—as the bicycle is considered as a possible catalyst for development. Using interviews and photos, the role of “safe space” in the growing body of Bicycles for Development literature is highlighted, and the authors make a connection between Sport for Development scholarship and literature related to youth cultural activities and spaces. The findings reveal the benefits associated with program engagement and challenges despite program-related benefits.

Understandings of who plays college sports are dominated by assumptions that lack academic scrutiny. Using the Education Longitudinal Study (N = 7,810) and multilevel modeling, this study examines the extent to which high school indicators of family socioeconomic statuses, athletic development and merit, academic expectations and knowledge, and school contexts predict the likelihood of becoming a college athlete. The authors find evidence that supports our understanding of the process of becoming a college athlete being shaped by family socioeconomic status. Still, high school sport participation characteristics, academic expectations and knowledge, and school contexts also seem to offer independent contributions to the odds of becoming a college athlete. Overall, these results suggest that college athletic opportunities are not simply a function of athletic merit, based on unique analyses of quantitative empirical evidence from a large national sample of high school students.

This paper examines the role of collective memory in the protection of “traditional” sociocultural and symbolic aspects of football vis-à-vis the processes of commodification and globalization. Empirical evidence that underpins the analysis is drawn from a multisite ethnographic study of football fan activism in the Czech Republic, Italy, and England, as well as at the European level. The authors argue that collective memory represents a significant component of the supporters’ mobilization and is related to the protection of specific football sites of memory, including club names, logos, colors, places, heroes, tragedies, and histories. The authors further explain that collective memory operates through three interconnected dimensions: embedded collective memory, transcendent collective memory, and the collective memory of contentious politics.