A just organized youth sport

ABSTRACT

Organized youth sport has become a prominent activity in Western societies, one around which myriad families structure their daily lives. Despite its popularity, or rather because of it, youth sport is besotted with complex problems. One distinctive set of problems pertains to children’s opportunities to benefit from engagement in sport. Such problems require a reflection on the conditions of justice. The goal of this paper is to explore ethical guidelines to make youth sport more just. The paper begins by characterizing childhood, youth, and youth sport. Then, it articulates considerations of justice in youth sport. Together, these sections provide a basis to formulate the general features of a just youth sport. What emerges is a vision of youth sport that the adults involved in it should emphasize and implement if their young charges, and youth sport, are to flourish, as well as a novel approach to formulating and justifying normative criteria to make youth sport more just.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth sport
• ethics
• autonomy
• justice
• childhood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. For a history of organized youth sport in the United States, see, for example, Wiggins (2013). The essays in Kristiansen, Parent, and Houlihan (2017) analyze the emergence and growth of elite organized youth sport across fifteen countries in four continents. For simplicity’s sake, throughout the paper we will refer to organized youth sport simply as youth sport.

2. A historical comment on the adoption of this treaty and its predecessors is found in Tobin (2019).

3. See the essays in Kristiansen, Parent, and Houlihan (2017).

4. See also, for example, Kretchmar (2019) and Kretchmar and Elcombe (2007).

5. For a robust analysis of children’s rights claims in sport, see David (2005).

6. Young (1990) further defines ‘oppression’ as ‘systematic institutional processes which prevent people from learning and using satisfying and expansive skills in socially recognized settings’ and ‘domination’ as ‘structural or systemic phenomena which exclude people from participating in determining their actions’ (38 and 31).

7. For an in-depth analysis of youth sport systems, see Dorsch et al. (2022).

8. These experiences vary across countries, depending on the prevalence and strength of performance-oriented attitudes (Strandbu et al. 2019).

9. A complete exploration of the complex relationship between the basic (and scarce) benefits of youth sport and children’s interests and needs exceeds the goal of this paper. However, it is important to clarify that while the basic (and scarce) benefits of youth sport are derived from participating in it, children’s interests and needs are inherent to their condition qua children and are, thus, shared by all children.