Building collegiate adapted sports: goalball case study

ABSTRACT

Campus Recreation should be providing sport and recreation opportunities to students of all social identity groups. This includes students with physical and sensory disabilities. In fact, federal law mandates that equal opportunity and access to extracurricular athletics should exist for this population. Despite evident personal and social benefits to participation in campus recreation, an in-depth understanding of how programs and initiatives are being developed to meet the various needs and preferences of students is missing from the literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine program development of collegiate adapted sports. After initially interviewing thirteen leaders from six collegiate goalball, we decided to focus on the intrinsic case of LU goalball in order to tell its narrative with rich detail from beginning to end. The voices recounting the process of creating LU goalball are three of its foundational leaders: a student, a coach and an assistant director of campus recreation. We contextualized their lived accounts using three of four components of the change process identified by the theory and practice of multicultural organization development: identification of change agents, organization readiness and planning and implementation. As a whole, findings demonstrate the process undertaken by one collegiate goalball program as well as the impact it had at an individual and institutional level.

KEYWORDS:

• Adapted sports
• goalball
• campus recreation
• multicultural organization development

Disclosure statement

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