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In this research, faculty reported attempts to influence their academic decisions regarding student athletes. In most instances the pressure was not formal or frequently applied, and it appeared to have little influence on faculty judgments or their willingness to assist athletes. Except for isolated situations of a flagrant nature that are sensationalized by the media, the problem seems not to be a major one.

This study employed critical race theory (CRT) as an interpretive framework to explore faculty members’ perceptions about Black and White U.S. college student-athletes’ academic and post-undergraduate accomplishments. Using photo elicitation method, randomly assigned faculty participants responded to a photo and vignette of a student-athlete by race. Results indicated that some faculty held differential feelings toward Black and White student-athletes with respect to their academic and post-undergraduate accomplishments. Such feelings were less favorable for Black male and female student-athletes as compared with their White counterparts. The implications of these findings should be discussed among faculty, student affairs leaders, coaches, and others who frequently interact with student-athletes and are committed to creating more equitable educational environments for all students.

Several female athletes have recently challenged the long-standing assumption that pregnancy/parenthood (particularly motherhood) and participation in elite-level sport are mutually exclusive. These women’s actions have elicited change across the elite athletics industry and have sparked a need for further research to understand how elite athlete-parents perceive these shifts. We used feminist poststructuralist theory, feminist participatory action research, and semistructured interviews to explore the perspectives of 21 pregnant and parenting elite/international and world-class athletes (11 women and 10 men) on the developing degree of acceptance of parenthood in elite athletics. Through feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, we identified that, despite considerable recent advancements, there is still a need for continued change in the degree to which pregnant/parenting elite athletes are accepted and supported within elite athletics.

On April 6, 2018, the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team was traveling to a playoff game on a rural highway when their bus collided with a semitrailer truck, killing 16 people. The crash led to an unparalleled, nation-wide outpouring of mourning. The legacy of the crash has been sustained by media outlets such as The Sports Network, who released a documentary on the crash, 29 Forever. Through an affective reading of 29 Forever, this paper explores the processes by which the Humboldt bus crash came to be known and felt as a national tragedy, how the crash fits within larger practices of Canadian nation-making, and the role that hockey, emotion, and feelings play in these processes.

Despite a longstanding relationship with hockey, Black Canadians are typically erased from dominant histories of Canada and sport. Erasure is detrimental to Black prosperity because it encourages social death, a process that socially marginalizes and dehumanizes Black Canadians. In response to Black erasure, we detail counter-narratives that challenge the historically whitewashed account of hockey’s origin in Canada. We celebrate the impact and contributions of Black Canadians, who transformed hockey while using it as a sport-for-development vehicle in the 19th and 20th century. Given the centrality of hockey to Canadian nationalism, we suggest that Black erasure within sport and society is an attempt at Black social death within Canada. By highlighting the sport development and sport-for-development work of Black Canadians, our objective is to confront Black erasure and exclusion. That way, Black presence becomes less surprising in the grand narrative of Canada, and Black social death becomes less certain.

This article argues that counter-hegemony, which is at the heart of sports activism, is not just an action but also the construction of alternative institutional structures. For this purpose, it investigates the practices of an amateur football club and discusses the structural problems of the Turkish amateur football league. The data, collected during a 6-month field study, were interpreted from a critical perspective, using a dialectical dialogue method to apply the theory of hegemony in sports by applying Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual.” Consequently, this sports club has provided socialization and free football training for children while creating an alternative football culture with local characteristics that are opposed to class and gender inequalities and to homophobic attitudes common in sport.