SBYD and Social Justice: Defining Quality and Its Impact on Youth Experience
The content in this autoethnography manuscript is significant because it takes a different angle than the typical discourse surrounding sport-based youth development (SBYD). Typically, the discourse on SBYD focuses on the positive outcomes of improved social–emotional learning and academic achieveme...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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MDPI AG
2025-06-01
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| Series: | Youth |
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| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2673-995X/5/2/54 |
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| Summary: | The content in this autoethnography manuscript is significant because it takes a different angle than the typical discourse surrounding sport-based youth development (SBYD). Typically, the discourse on SBYD focuses on the positive outcomes of improved social–emotional learning and academic achievement. In using an autoethnographic approach, I share stories from my personal experience as a practitioner in the field to illustrate a new perspective on how to think about the impact of sport-based youth development on young people. Though those outcomes are positive and impactful, they fail to capture the continued inequity in the quality of youth sports programs in underserved communities compared to others. I utilize research in SBYD to analyze each story as a practitioner in the field to thoroughly reflect on my personal experiences and their relation to social justice. The stories are also a tool for making the connection between the individual work of various organizations pursuing sport equity. Through storytelling, reflection, and analysis, I connect the mission of each organization I worked with to the concept of social justice youth development in a more personalized way than numbers and data can illustrate. Additionally, this autoethnography highlights non-traditional sport spaces and advocates for a way to fuse social justice into them. This manuscript seeks to simultaneously refresh the way equity in sport has been looked at, while also illuminating the ways it is already being examined. The paper presents new questions that can be used to better analyze the presence of social justice in youth sports and provides a potential pathway forward by grounding in a definition of quality SBYD programming. These questions imply that the measures of the impact and potential benefits of SBYD may need to be redefined to better match the real lived experiences of individual youth participating in such programs. |
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| ISSN: | 2673-995X |