The Experience of Care in Sport: An Institutional Ethnography Of Youth Competitive Volleyball

Research on power relations between coaches and athletes, as well as the abuse of a coachs power and the consequences of this abuse for athletes, is well established in both the critical socio-cultural study of sport, broadly, as well as the critical study of sport coaching. Although not all athletes have negative sport experiences, research on athlete harm and maltreatment is well documented, and much of this work has focused on identifying the spectrum of maltreatment, programmatic and policy responses to address these concerns, and the power of coaches in their sport role. However, more foundational analyses of care and caring in competitive sport remain conspicuously absent and this absence of attention to care serves as an important point of departure for this study which aims to add to and extend vitally need conversations and actions on athlete welfare through a critical socio-philosophical examination of the conceptualizations and lived experiences of care and caring within the context of Ontario youth competitive volleyball. Specifically, this study is concerned with how care is understood and constructed in the context of competitive youth sport by athletes, parents and coaches and, more pointedly, how these ideas translate to the practice of care in sport coaching. Informed by the feminist philosophical framework of the Ethics of Care (EoC), and employing institutional ethnography (IE) methodology, this project examines the conceptualizations of care within the context of one youth volleyball team in Ontario. Data from document analysis and interviews with coaches, athletes, and parents highlight the ways in which care at the institutional level focused more so on the identifying and preventing uncaring practices rather than illuminating what constitutes care, while simultaneously constructing coaches as the primary (if not sole) providers of care to athletes. Overall, the findings illuminate that care/caring remains a poorly understand but highly powerful and abstract construct in a context (i.e., competitive sport) that, at times, foregrounds performance.