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This case study illustrates the complexity of decision making in public organizations, specifically highlighting the public health concern of drowning disparities in the United States. Using escalation of commitment theory, students must consider various factors in evaluating the overextended commitments of a local government in a complicated sociopolitical environment and with vital public needs that must be addressed through a local parks and recreation department. Facing a reduction in allocated resources, the department director, Claire Meeks, is tasked with determining which programs will receive higher priority despite the varied feedback from the management staff. To ensure students are provided a realistic scenario, this case offers a combination of fictional and real-life events from Splash Mid-South, an innovative swimming program in Memphis, Tennessee. Students must critically evaluate not only the merits of the swimming program, but the other sport, recreation, and parks programs that also merit an equitable share of the limited resources. Therefore, students are placed in a decision-making role that is common to managers of both public and private organizations. This case study is appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate sport management courses, with specific application to strategic management, organizational behavior, and recreation or leisure topics.

Options for athletes with disabilities to participate in sport have risen and, with them, supercrip representation. Supercrip is defined as a stereotypical representation of individuals with disabilities that highlights their accomplishments as inspirational stories of defying or overcoming their disability to succeed. With little consensus on how to represent disability in sport, it is imperative that this representation be investigated. The purpose of this commentary is to broadly examine assumptions of the supercrip model as a mode of representation for athletes with disabilities, explore its connection to able-bodied hegemony, and propose next steps in facilitating research and discourse around representation for athletes with disabilities. We conclude that able-bodied hegemony is the root of the supercrip model and that participatory action research, with stakeholders at the center, is necessary to fully evaluate the supercrip model.

The current investigation uses critical discourse analysis to compare how international media entities portrayed Brazil in the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. The aim of the study was to understand how the specific characteristics of each event impact the media discourse and influence the portrayal of the host country. In this sense, the research concluded that the popular appeal of the event and the historical relation of the country with the sport have a profound impact on the type of coverage. Also, historical aspects and the diversity of athletes in the Summer Olympics contributed to a coverage more focused on the social issues of the host country. In the Brazilian case, this resulted in a more positive view of the country from the FIFA World Cup than the Summer Olympics.

Attempts were made to explore the value of the multiple social identities approach in reducing the detrimental effects of stereotype threats in the context of spectator sports. A total of 150 females were recruited for a laboratory experiment. The following manipulations were implemented: (a) stereotype threat, (b) threat along with the implicit team identification activation, and (c) control. The results revealed that females in the threat condition showed a reduced level of psychological well-being; paradoxically, negative stereotypes positively influenced their self-esteem. The activation of implicit team identification alleviated the detrimental consequences of threat by inhibiting the spreading activation of harmful stereotypes regarding women in sports. The main theoretical frameworks of this study consisted of the process account of stereotype threat suggested in cognitive psychology. The authors attempted to offer a stronger understanding of the underlying mental processes of stereotype threat on women as well as an effective means to deal with its detrimental consequences.

This study investigated athlete expressions and the impact that Olympian (OLY) role models have on athletes participating at the Youth Olympic Games (YOG), with a focus on the YOG educational program. The YOG educational program was created in 2010 and has not yet garnered extensive scholarly examination. Therefore, the aim of the current investigation was to develop an understanding of the impact that OLY role models have on YOG athletes and the communicative practices young athletes use to express themselves. This study used a mixed methodology (i.e., survey and interviews) and drew on three theories (i.e., social learning theory, role model theory, and communicative theory of expression) to better understand the aforementioned impact of OLY role models on YOG athletes. An examination of the communicative expression practices of OLY role models, through the mixed methodological approach, produced novel findings pertaining to YOG athlete perceptions of the structure and benefit of the educational program.