Sports Coaches and Coaching as Engendered Gendered Teaching, Mentorship, and Leadership: Collegiate Student-Athletes’ Interpretative Responses

• In Event: 4154 - Gender Relations in Contemporary Sport

Abstract

The interpretative responses of 34 collegiate varsity student-athletes (6 females and 28 males) were examined based on their everyday understandings of the sociocultural interaction and relations they have with their high school sports coaches and coaching. Symbolic Interactionism, and Critical Cultural and Gender Studies theoretical frameworks were used; semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted. The results showed that student-athletes’ interpretations of their athletic experiences engendered notions of gendered teaching, mentorship, and leadership. Specifically, we found that the social status, institutional roles, and previous accomplishments resonated firmly in gendered ideas and beliefs, which the males collectively expressed. Additionally, the study revealed that a strong social bonds were erect on their coach’s ability to exemplify trustworthiness via ritual practices of reciprocal respectability, along with rebates towards them by serving as role models, mentors, and father figures. We problematize the overt gender bias in males’ use of language and rhetoric that revealed engendered gendered notions of sports teachers, mentors, and leaders, that privilege men and masculinity all-the-while simultaneously ostracizing and excluding women. We assert these males’ responses, collectively, reflect a mixture of their internalization of dominant paternal sport ideologies and personal experiences with their coaches and coaching, that propagated and equated coaches and coaching with overt, exclusive, male mentor-based, father-figure, sports leadership paradigms.

Author

• Kenneth Sean Chaplin, John Carroll University