Sport Clusters and Community Resilience in the United States

Abstract

How to enhance community resilience to natural disasters is a major question for researchers and policymakers. Although researchers agree that sport generates community benefits, few scholarly efforts in sport management have been invested in understanding the sport–resilience association. This paper attempted to address whether and how sport clusters—the clustering of sport industries—are associated with community resilience across locations. To achieve this, geographically weighted regression and visualization techniques were applied to macro-level data regarding community resilience and the clustering of 13 separate sport industries across 3,108 counties in the contiguous United States. The results indicate that, overall, the clustering of eight sport industries was significantly associated with community resilience and demonstrates the existence of spatially heterogeneous associations in magnitudes and signs of community resilience in sport clusters. The findings of this paper have the potential to help community sport scholars and policymakers implement location-specific resilience policies through sport industry development.