Fourteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

This study examines how youth sports privatization, family dynamics, coaching, and team organization affect Latinx youth’s opportunities and interests in playing competitive soccer. I draw upon my three-year ethnographic study of Latinx youth who play soccer in Las Vegas, Nevada. My main goal is to understand their hopes, experiences, and family expectations in a context in which costs for sports participation are rising, while Latinx youth participation has declined. This dynamic raises questions about how intersecting oppressions related to race, class, and gender are expressed and experienced in youth sport and how cultural ideals for inclusion and advancement through sport are nullified for many. My research questions include: 1) How do Latinx youth ages 12-19 make sense of their soccer participation? 2) What barriers do they perceive in their soccer participation and how do these experiences differ across gender, class, and other social factors? 3) Why do parents want their child to participate in soccer and how do these families manage this extracurricular sport activity in terms of time and resources? 4) What do coaches believe are the reasons for and outcome of youth soccer participation? 5) How do youth soccer organizations’ mission, organization, and practices shape youth sport experiences? I seek to center the voices of those who have been most influenced by the growing costs and other barriers to soccer participation to offer a corrective to youth sport research which has highlighted white male youth much more than Latinx and other non-white youth experiences.