SPORTS EVENTS

Sports Events Effects on Community Development



Sports Events Effects on Community Development

Introduction

Organized sport, as an area of social life, has become increasingly significant in the last 150 years. Sport now attracts the attention, time, resources, and energy of many millions of people around the world. In addition to the significance of sport itself as a cultural form, it is an activity that is related to and has the ability to shed light on many other aspects of society such as education, the media, health, the economy, politics, families and communities, and to expose social processes such as globalization, democratization, and socialization to sociological analysis. Despite this, sociological attention to such a significant area of social life continues to be limited (Donnelly, 2000), with some suggesting that the sociology of sport has been the “Rodney Dangerfield” of sociology.

Sports Events Effect Community Development

Donnelly (2000) mentions sports events affect community development in a number of ways. Sport managers operating within community level sport organizations such as local clubs and associations must be able to provide safe and enjoyable sport participation opportunities. To do this, they manage risks for participants; they design, build, and manage sport facilities; they provide hospitality and support services for players, spectators, volunteers, and officials; they plan, implement, and manage events and competitions; they manage human resources that include volunteers and paid staff; they negotiate with commercial sponsors and government funding agencies for financial support for their organizations; and they identify, train, and educate athletes, coaches, and officials to sustain sporting activities (Donnelly, 2000). They also apply management principles in developing and sustaining positive organizational cultures within sport organizations, in regulating the actions of members and organizations involved in sporting endeavors, and in governing their organizations, which have no owners as is the case in the corporate sector. Managing sport at the community or professional levels therefore requires an understanding of several unique attributes of the sport management environment. The following sections of this chapter review nine such attributes. While these should be considered the most significant attributes, they are by no means the only unique attributes of managing sport organizations in the 21st century.

Sport can stimulate an emotional intensity in its consumers that commercial products are rarely able to stimulate. Sport fans can develop powerful emotional attachments to players, teams, and the sport itself. We know that some followers are so passionate that their interests border on obsession. This addiction provides the emotional glue that binds fans to teams, and maintains loyalty even in the face of on-field failure. We also know (Mills, 2000), however, that other supporters have a more casual relationship with sport leagues and teams and that their attendance at games can change in response to the likelihood of a close contest, previous wins and losses, the state of the venue, and even the weather (Mills, 2000).

Fans can be incredibly loyal, but they can also be fickle and critical. Some might use athletes and teams to build their self-esteem, but others may use them simply to ...