Normative Bridges and Barriers in the Framing of Emerging Sports Movements

Abstract

Why have some small, emerging sports communities grown faster than others? To begin answering this question, the analysis presented here considers the case of disc golf, a flying disc sport that has grown rapidly since the early twenty-first century. This research conceptualizes the disc golf community as a new social movement and examines how the news media has influenced its development. Drawing on a large, diverse sample of local and national news materials, this study finds that the volume of disc golf news coverage is correlated with reliable measures of the sport’s growth. In addition, a content analysis of 2920 newspaper articles is used to identify the news frames that may promote, or attenuate disc golf’s “grow the sport movement.” The theoretical and methodological contributions of this study shed further light on the complex relationship between the news media and the evolution of small, non-normative sports movements.

Acknowledgements

I wish to convey my gratitude to Matthew Hartwell and Elizabeth Boycan for their help coding newspaper articles. Also, thanks go to the Professional Disc Golf Association for its support.

Notes

1 Data on the number of PDGA members, events and courses were collected from the PDGA website, “PDGA Year End Demographics,” from https://www.pdga.com.

2 Lexis Nexis was used for the New York Times and Washington Post searches; ProQuest was used for the Wall Street Journal search.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Woods

Joshua Woods is an associate professor of sociology at West Virginia University, and editor at Parked, an academic blog devoted to the study of emerging sports. He has taught courses on social psychology, complex organizations, social research methods, media and society, and introduction to sociology. He is the coauthor of Debating Immigration in the Age of Terrorism, Polarization, and Trump (Lexington Books 2017), the author of Freaking Out: A Decade of Living with Terrorism (Potomac, 2012), the coauthor of Feudal America: Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society (Penn State University Press, 2011), and coeditor of America: Sovereign Defender or Cowboy Nation? (Ashgate, 2005).