ABSTRACT
As this Handbook attests, the recent emergence of scholarship seeking to understand cross-national differences in sports development systems has generated more thorough efforts to characterize the ontological and ideological distinctions between the policies and programmes designed to cultivate elite athletes and encourage mass participation (cf. Chalip et al 1996; Green and Oakley 2001). Scholars and practitioners interested in understanding sport in the United States may be surprised to learn that the systems undergirding youth sport development are remarkable as much for their lack of interconnectedness as for their production of successful elite athletes on the international stage (B. Green 2005). Despite the high-profile nature of the latter systemic output, it is the facade of coordination at the input stage that serves as the primary focus of this chapter. The utility of sports development has been established as having two fundamental components:
the cultivation of elite athletes for national teams and the encouragement of mass rates of sport participation (e.g. M. Green 2007; Palm 1991). Although these two goals of sports development represent conceptually distinct enterprises, they are inexorably tied to one another through the need of elite sport programmes to draw from a deep pool of athletes in their search for developable talent (Broom 1991; Stovkis 1989). In explicating the theoretical framework for the pyramid model of youth sport development in which the relatively few high-performing elite athletes are supported by a broad participation base, B. Green (2005: 248) notes that in the United States systems of development ‘have emerged haphazardly’. Moreover, ‘sport programmes occur at various levels and in many places but are often ambiguously linked. At times, they might even be in conflict’ (B. Green 2005: 248). While such an assertion may seem counterintuitive given the country’s undisputed success in elite competition, the genesis of this uncoordinated system is readily ascribable to a hegemonic sociopolitical agenda that has pervaded the modern sports policy landscape in the United States (Sparvero et al. 2008). Prior to the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich, the United States had no guiding
legislation specifying sports development policies, which was consistent with the country’s historical reticence to introduce federal control into traditionally private sectors (Chalip 1995). However, with the internationally televised administrative failures and underperformance by American
athletes in Munich serving as a focusing event, an undercurrent of concern about preserving national prestige during the Cold War mobilized governmental efforts to form a central administrative body under the Amateur Sports Act. The problem, however, was that establishing federal control over sport was perceived by many as consummate to adopting the Soviet model of sports governance, an outcome precluded by the political climate of the period. The unwillingness of the government to make substantive changes to the levels of federal control permitted over sport in America ultimately led to an impotent legislative outcome designed to rationalize the preservation of the status quo. Ultimately, Chalip contends,
This is significant because the focus on administrative rationalization eliminated consideration of alternative or supplementary policy options. For example, redress of socioeconomic inequities in sport access and development of grassroots sports programs were given scant attention. It was tacitly assumed that inequities would be redressed and new sports programs created if the upper levels of sport governance were rationalized. Neither equal access nor program development were pursued as distinct goals of policy action, despite the fact that earlier research, White House reports, and congressional hearings had identified both as necessary components of an effective sport policy.
