Sport Governance, Development and Corporate Responsibility

Sports have long been viewed as an opportunity to engage young people in a positive alternative and not just in terms of participation in sports activities, but across a range of issues including education, employment and training, community leadership and healthy lifestyles. Much scepticism revolves around sport's wider social role, due to an unavailability of convincing evidence supporting such claims (Coalter, 2007a). Terms that have been used to address youth for whom such practices are conceived lack any clear scientific underpinning and have failed to address institutional structures and social arrangements that tend to keep these youth target groups (Weiss, 1998). In this paper we propose a conceptual framework, which encompasses both agency and structure. By using the theory of social vulnerability (Vettenburg, 1998), we will discuss what has already been written on the level of the coaching in and the organizing of sports-based practices for vulnerable youth.

ISBN:978-0-415-52249-6

Publication year:2012

Keywords:youth sports, social vulnerability, organization, coaching