Junior Sport and the Evolution of Sport Cultures

Abstract

I am grateful to be asked to share some thoughts with you on the topic of junior sport. I have enormous respect for the sport culture of New Zealand, and I have been impressed with the serious efforts taken in recent years in New Zealand to strengthen and make more educative the junior sport aspects of your larger sport culture. Sport has been the central, defining focus of my life and I owe much to it, but as a famous coach at my university once said, can't pay back, you can only pay forward. I take it that many here assembled have been similarly influenced by their sport experiences and have come together to see how you might collectively pay forward to improve the junior sport experiences for Kiwi juniors of the future. It has become increasingly difficult over the past quarter-century for intellectuals to poke fun at adults who take sport seriously, not just during competition, but who also take it seriously as a cultural form, a major thread woven into and holding together the fabric of society. A generation ago, if you took sport seriously as an adult, many thought that you had spent too much time in the toy department! Over the past 20 years, sport has commanded the attention of scholars such as A. Bartlett Ciamatti (1989) and Michael Novak (1976), each of whom argued that sport played a central, civilizing role in culture. Sport has also attracted the attention of neo-Marxist scholars who see it as a central mechanism for continued hegemonic patriarchal control in the developed democracies of the world. Either way, it's better to be taken seriously than to be ignored. I assume that sport is central to your culture, as it has become to the cultures of most developed nations, and that New Zealand sport embodies certain cultural values you wish to transmit to future generations. I also assume, using a biological analogy, that sport practices evolve. They are always changing, albeit often so slowly that we don't immediately recognize the changes. That doesn't mean that sport cultures necessarily get better-there is no ideological force ensuring good sport and a healthy and sane sport culture. Sport practices can devolve also, and in so doing contribute to the demise of a culture through the spread of values that are antithetical to a free, progressive society. You are assembled here to try to ensure the continued progress of the New Zealand sport culture, and you rightly assume that junior sport policies and practices are crucial to that progress. Graham Dalton, in the Sunday Auckland Star-Times, suggested that this forum would be the most important event in New Zealand sport for many years to come. The first suggestion I have is to urge you to examine junior sport with the seriousness it deserves given its crucial role in the future of your sport culture. Junior sport policies and practices need serious examination, serious debate, and continual dialogue. They don't need competing mythologies and unexamined creeds. Let me give an example of what I mean. In my country there has been a prevailing mythology that boys will turn into men only if they experience the magic elixer of football competition. This is particularly true for troubled boys who, as the creed goes, if brought under the influence of some tough coaches and experience competition that is characterized primarily by physical confrontation between opponents, will emerge with newly attained qualities of character such as persistence, courage, and the willingness to overcome physical discomfort, all of which are ascribed as nearly automatic benefits of these experiences. This mythology is a vulgarization of Arnoldism, the mid-19th-century philosophy of fair play that took the name of the headmaster at the Rugby School in England. Arnodlism in its pure form was a philosophy that not only taught how one ought to behave in sport, but used sport as a metaphor for how life should be lived. Needless to say, there is nothing inherently positive about the influence of sport on developing children and youths. …