Introduction: youth sport and social captial

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Notes

1. The names of all places and people named herein are pseudonymous.

2. Intergenerational closure, from Coleman’s work, describes a situation where the parents of a pair of child friends also know each other.

3. Small (2009) has argued that the strength of relationship may not be as important as social capital scholars have made it out to be, particularly where the exchange is domain-specific.

4. In the VCLL, the head coach is called a manager (like on a Major League Baseball team) and all assistants are known as coaches. Throughout the text, I will use ‘coach’ and ‘assistant’ interchangeably, but I will refer to all head coaches as managers.

5. Though I do not address it extensively in these papers, I want to note for a minute the utility of electronic communication, specifically text messaging, for this project. The members of the VCLL, particularly the Board of Directors, texted each other extensively. This presented a written (though truncated) account of many of their interactions. It also allowed for private or ‘backstage’ style communication between board members during meetings. In such environments such as these, and where appropriate, I strongly encourage ethnographers to both use and attempt to gain access to these forms of communication with informants. In situations such as this one, it effectively though briefly allowed me to be in two places at once.

6. Little League has a hierarchical organization which begins at the local level. Leagues are not coterminous with city limits, however. A group of local leagues together form a District. Each year, the All-Star teams from the leagues in a district will compete to represent the district in the State tournament.