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Description
Administrators often fulfill the role of gatekeeper, as some of their decisions can contribute to facilitating or limiting access to certain groups, such as children of low-income families. The challenges faced by such families could be even more important in the competitive context, given the associated costs. The purpose of this study was to explore perceptions, attitudes, and roles of sport administrators with respect to the participation of children from low-income families in the competitive sport programs they managed. Semi-structured interviews with 11 administrators were conducted and Bourdieu's sociological stance was adopted in their analysis. Results showed how the administrators’ habitus appeared to be rooted in their own experiences in sport. Their habitus generated managerial practices that were geometrically variable with respect to socioeconomic issues. Also, administrators’ cultural and symbolic capital endowments bore important influence on their capacity to exercise power within their sports organizations. Also, the administrators’ framed their perspectives and decision-making within what appeared to be an uncontested doxa of sport talent development. In this respect, the State and sports federations could contribute, through the imposition of imperatives associated with the production of sports talent, to the issue of inaccessibility by driving an increase in participation fees where the predominant goal of competitive youth sport is the generation of high-performance athletes. As a result, by virtue of the decisions that are within their purview, administrators uncritical of these costs could unconsciously play a determining role in the economic, symbolic and cultural capital required to access competitive youth sport.
