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As the title of this article suggests, I describe in this essay how my career has been shaped by specific events, such as not knowing the rules of the game I loved and played extensively, and significant mentors, such as the venerable Dr. Earl Zeigler and Dr. Garth Paton. I also explain how I been involved in the birth and growth of the field of sport management. More importantly, I show how the field has shaped my career and has opened up opportunities for me to travel the world in propagating the field around the globe.

With a view of verifying the optimistic forecasts of the growth of the sport industry, the paper presents an estimate of the size of the sport industry in 2005 and compares it to a 1995 estimate provided by Meek (1997). Following the methodology of Meek and the guidelines put forth by the United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis (2007), we present three estimates for the size of the Gross Domestic Sport Product (GDSP) of the United States of America in 2005—conservative estimate of $168.469 billion, moderate estimate of $189.338 billion, and the liberal estimate of $207.503 billion. A comparison of the moderate estimate with Meek’s 1995 estimate shows that the size of sport industry, in relative terms, actually declined. The sources of the data, rationale for three different estimates, and the values for the components of the GDSP are described and explained.

This article builds on prior theory and research on institutional logics and shows how a multisports club changes during its organizational life from an all amateur or voluntary logic to embody multiple logics simultaneously with different subunits being aligned with different organizational fields. The emergence of the professional logic for elite soccer in the presence of a volunteer logic caused a change in the structure of the club whereby all the units in the club became economically and legally autonomous. Soccer was divisionalized into soccer for everybody and soccer for the elite. The creation of a shareholding company and the use of an investment company which introduced the commercial logic were the next steps. This paper extends the literature by suggesting that different and opposing institutional logics such as the amateur, the professional, and commercial logics can coexist within a multisports club or, to put it another way, that the multisports club may belong to several organizational fields.

As an emerging research approach, social network theory and analysis has been embraced and effectively applied in disciplines that have overlapping interests with sport management researchers including such fields as organizational behavior and sport sociology. Although a number of sport management scholars have investigated network-related concepts, to date no sport management studies have fully utilized the analytical tools that social network theory and analysis have to offer. In conjunction with a discussion about the ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives associated with network analysis, this article uses several examples from the sport management and organizational behavior bodies of literature to illustrate a number of the advantageous techniques and insights social network theory and analysis can offer. These examples are meant to provide a general understanding of the utility and applicability of the social network theory and analysis and potentially inspire sport management researchers to adopt a social network lens in their future research endeavors.

The works of Kuhn (1996) and other scholars on the social construction of knowledge suggest that great insight can be gained about an academic field of study by investigating interaction patterns between and among scholars. Using a social network perspective, the intent of this study was to empirically explore the social interaction patterns among scholars in the field of sport management. A network model of coauthorship was generated using several rounds of sampling of scholars in the field and archival data collection from relevant journals. The derived network structure was then explored both visually and quantitatively for meaningful patterns. The results of the study essentially tell a story of the evolution and current state of the field’s collaboration structure. Drawing on propositions from the literature on the sociology of scientific knowledge generation, the findings are discussed relative to what the obtained network structure might hold for sport management scholarship.

Male coaches from NCAA Division I (n = 297), Division III (n = 294), and Japanese universities (n = 254) responded to the Coach Satisfaction Questionnaire measuring satisfaction with supervision, coaching job, autonomy, facilities, media and community support, pay, team performance, amount of work, colleagues, athletes’ academic performance, and job security; and Blau, Paul, and St. John's (1993) General Index of Work Commitment. Japanese coaches expressed significantly lower satisfaction than American coaches with seven facets (supervision, coaching job, autonomy, team performance, colleagues, athletes' academic performance, and job security). American coaches were significantly more committed to their occupation than the Japanese coaches who were significantly more committed to their organizations than American coaches.

This study investigated the differences in job attitudes between part-time (n = 96) and full-time (n = 82) workers in Korean sports organizations. They responded to a questionnaire including Meyer and Allen's (1984) scales for affective (AC) and continuance commitment (CC), and Smith, Organ, and Neat’s (1983) organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analyses of the data supported the subscale structures and the equivalence of measurement in the two groups. The full-time workers scored significantly higher on AC and OCB while the part-time workers scored higher on CC. While the relationship between AC and OCB was positive and significant in both groups, it was stronger in the full-time group than in the part-time group. The relationship between CC and OCB was significant and negative only in the case of the full-time group. The implication is that part-time work is not as conducive as fall-time work for developing affective commitment or organizational citizenship behavior.

This study investigated the extent to which two stakeholder groups of intercollegiate athletics (faculty and students) differed in the importance they attached to 10 selected goals and their approval of 11 selected processes within intercollegiate athletics. A total of 652 respondents (341 faculty, 311 students, 337 men, 310 women) from a large midwestern university responded to a questionnaire developed for this study. Results showed that subgroups, defined by faculty-student status, and gender differed significantly in most instances. These differences and the similarities in the rank ordering of the goals and processes are discussed.

This study tested the propositions that (a) perceived leader-member exchange quality (LMX) between second level managers (e.g., associate, assistant athletic directors) and their subordinates would be associated with perceived transformational leadership behaviors (TL) of the athletic director, and (b) subordinates' organizational commitment (OC) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) would be correlated with both perceived TL and LMX. Seventy-five third tier employees of a large Midwestern university responded to the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire-MLQ (Bass, 1985); LMX-7 (Graen, Novak, & Sommerkamp, 1982), an organizational citizenship scale (MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Fetter, 1991); and an organizational commitment scale (Meyer & Allen, 1997). Correlational and regression analyses showed that the three dimensions of TL were significantly correlated with LMX. Additionally, the dimensions of TL and LMX were differentially related to OC and OCB.

This research assessed the direct and indirect influences of personal values on the importance attached to intercollegiate athletic goals, and approval of various processes in intercollegiate athletics. Students and faculty of a large Midwestern university responded to a questionnaire consisting of Schwartz's Value Scale (SVS), and Trail and Chelladurai's Scale of Athletic Department Goals (SADG) and Scale of Athletic Department Processes (SADP). Structural Equation Modeling procedures showed that the model of goals fully mediating the relationship between personal values and processes was more tenable than alternate models. Further, the Power values were positively associated with importance ratings of athletic performance goals such as Winning, Financial Security, Visibility/Prestige, and Entertainment. Universalism values were positively associated with student developmental goals such as Health/Fitness, Academic Achievement and Careers. Managers of intercollegiate athletics would do well to link their emphases on specific processes and decisions to the relevant values held by critical stakeholders to engender support of the program.