“People care about building the community here”: Enacting community in a women’s recreational soccer group

Abstract

This qualitative study uses the bona fide group perspective to explore how members of a recreational soccer group communicatively enact their sport community. The group consists of women who meet weekly to play soccer together. Interviews and document analysis show that the women manage group boundaries and context through enacting alternative values, reinforcing discursive contrasts, and negotiating bounded inclusivity. These strategies establish the group as a recreational, supportive community based on friendship and compassion that is an alternative to hyper-masculine competitive sports. This study has implications for future research on life enrichment groups, particularly those organized by women.

Keywords:

• Bona Fide Group Perspective
• Community
• Life Enrichment Group
• Sport Communication
• Women’s Groups

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. The author would like to thank the members of the Women's League for sharing their stories for this research and taking time to offer feedback on earlier drafts. Thanks also go to Dr. Sheri Huckleberry for assistance with the interviews and to the Patton College of Education at Ohio University supporting Dr. Huckleberry's participation in this research. Finally, the author, along with other members of the Women's League, mourn the untimely passing of Tad Albano, who founded the Women's League in 2010. We are grateful to Tad for his vision in starting this group and inspiring so many in the region to participate in the beautiful game.

Notes

1. The overwhelming majority of these news stories reported the results of local high school varsity soccer games. I noted that this was the case but did not collect all of these stories for analysis since the particular aspects of these high school games were exogenous to this study.

2. To protect confidentiality, the names of all participants and potentially identifying organizations reported in this paper are pseudonyms.

3. The only interviewee who did not make this comparison was Lily, who joined the Women’s League as a newcomer to the sport and eventually stopped coming after an injury. She had no co-ed soccer experience and did not talk about the co-ed league.