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In the youth sports domain, few coaches are women, masculine ideologies permeate the culture, and coaching practices do not always align with behaviors supportive of positive youth sports experience. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in men’s and women’s coaching behaviors associated with creating positive youth sports experience, including behaviors that create a safe and fun participation environment, a mastery motivational climate, and autonomy-supportive coaching. A total of 219 youth and high school coaches across different sports in one county in a western state responded to the survey—29% of them women. Along with the overall dearth of women in coaching, we found differences between men and women in the types of coaching positions they hold and the behaviors they bring to their coaching. Female coaches were more likely to be paid, primarily part-time, and they were also less likely to have children. Using a multivariate analysis of variance, significant mean vectors were found between female and male coaches in the four coaching behaviors measured. Women’s ratings were significantly higher on individual measures for autonomy and safety. As the coaching field comes to better understand the approaches that lead to positive youth sports experience, these findings raise important questions about why women and mothers are not a larger proportion of the coaching landscape and how that might change.

This paper examines the tenuous balance of Indigenous generosity in hockey spaces with the need for non-Indigenous players and organizers to educate themselves and others, pursue systemic change, and unburden Indigenous players of the heavy lifting of anti-racism. Interviews with five Indigenous elite women’s hockey players identify hockey as a potential site of decolonial and anti-racist learning, fueled by the players’ love for the game and willingness to expend emotional labor to affect change. Our interviewees express the desire to make hockey safer for future generations of Indigenous players by educating their non-Indigenous teammates, often, in the process, exposing themselves to ignorance, indifference, and racism. The players uniformly argue that education is required for change; however, this paper illustrates that such education is not solely the responsibility of Indigenous participants in the game.

The adoption of classroom-based physical activity interventions in elementary schools is nearly universal (92%), but fewer than 22% of teachers who implement activity breaks achieve a dose of 10 min/day. Dissemination and implementation science frameworks provide a systematic approach to identifying and overcoming barriers likely to impede successful adoption and fidelity of evidence-based interventions. This review highlights the development and subsequent tailoring of a classroom-based physical activity intervention, Interrupting Prolonged sitting with ACTivity (InPACT), for delivery in low-resource schools using implementation science frameworks focused on equity. Unlike most classroom physical activity interventions, tailored InPACT includes a suite of implementation strategies (methods or techniques that support adoption, implementation, and sustainment of a program or practice) and, thus, has been designed for dissemination. These strategies were focused on increasing teacher self-efficacy and reducing multilevel implementation barriers in low-resource schools to promote intervention fidelity, effectiveness, and sustainment.

Interventions that are effective in research (efficacy or effectiveness) trials cannot improve health at a population level unless they are successfully delivered more broadly (scaled up) outside of the research setting. However, scale-up is often relegated to the too hard basket. Factors such as the need to adapt interventions prior to implementing them in diverse settings at scale, retaining fidelity to the intervention, and cultivating the necessary community and funding partnerships can all present a challenge. In the present review article, we present a scale-up case study—Choose to Move—an effective health-promoting intervention for older adults. The objectives of this review were to (a) describe the frameworks and processes adopted to implement, adapt, and scale up Choose to Move across British Columbia, Canada; (b) provide an overview of the phased approach to scale-up; and (c) share key lessons learned while implementing and scaling up health-promoting interventions with community partners across more than 2 decades.