Introduction
In the months following former National Football League (NFL) quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 on- field protests against police brutality, he became the epicenter of both the issue of police brutality and mistreatment of com-munities of color, but also about the practice of athlete activism itself. By the start of the 2017 NFL season, Kaepernick was no longer under contract in the NFL, despite competitively comparable individuals having continued employment. Though Kaepernick was not physically on the field, his influence was apparent, and by the third week of the 2017 season over 200 players were engaging in some form of protest during the playing of the National Anthem – protests which continued throughout the 2017– 2018 season. The 2017 NFL season was particularly notable as the President of the United States, Donald Trump, consistently opined on the activist actions of players from the NFL (Axson, 2017) elevating the protests and their coverage to the top of the daily news cycle. Indeed, the NFL protests were named by USA Today’s Tom Schad as the top sports news story of 2017 (Schad, 2017), and Jerry Bembry of The Undefeated noted that “2017 will be most remembered as the year of athletes and activism” (Bembry, 2017).
Despite the NFL protests reigniting a debate regarding the place of pro-test and activism in sport and athletics, the instances referenced above are no means novel. Athletes have, for more than a century, participated in activist action and conversation (Wulf, 2019), whereas scholars have, for decades, crit-ically examined the relationship between sport, society, and politics (Cooper, Macaulay, & Rodriguez, 2019; Cunningham, Dixon, Singer, Oshiro, Anh, &
Weems, 2019; Edwards, 1969; Moore, 2017). Though a retelling of all instances of athlete activism is beyond the scope of this chapter, athletes have consist-ently protested over time with sport being considered an apt place to speak out against a variety of social injustices (Cunningham et al., 2019; Edwards, 1969;
Edwards, 2016; Wulf, 2019). While men’s professional sport received the bulk of the media attention during the protests of 2016– 2018, athletes and organiza-tions such as Serena Williams, Megan Rapinoe, and The Los Angeles Sparks of
the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) were also at the fore-front of the modern athlete as activist movement (Wulf, 2019), and what sport sociologist Henry Edwards called the fifth wave of athlete activism, which is characterized by the use of social media to help athletes reach far wider audiences (Cooper, Macaulay, & Rodriguez, 2019). Indeed, female athletes have been a central presence of the recent resurgence of athlete activism. Importantly, while the initial wave of recent athlete activism focused on police brutality, athletes have also weighed in on other important social issues, including mental health and gender pay equity, climate change, and unionization.
In response to the modern generation of athlete activism, scholars from sport management, sport sociology and sport studies, among other disciplines, have developed lines of inquiry into the phenomenon. Scholars have investigated ath-lete activism in collegiate sport (Agyemang, Singer, & DeLorme, 2010; Melton, 2015), on collegiate campuses (Chaplin & Montez de Oca, 2019; Yan, Pegoraro, &
Wattanabe, 2018), from an institutional theory perspective (Agyemang, Berg, &
Fuller, 2018), in the media (Boykoff & Carrington, 2019; Montez de Oca
& Suh, 2019), on social media (Coombs & Cassilo, 2017; Cooper, Macaulay,
& Rodriguez, 2019; Edelman, 2018; Frederick, Pegoraro, & Sanderson (2018);
Frederick, Sanderson, & Schlereth, 2017; Gill, 2016; Marston, 2017), and from the perspective of Black male collegiate athletes (Agyemang, Singer, & Delorme, 2010), among others (Lee & Cunningham, 2019).
Despite the rapid increase in research on athlete activism in sport manage-ment, sport sociology, and sport studies, few of these studies have qualitatively examined athletes’ experiences or perceptions of athlete activism. In addition, there remains very little work on the perceptions and experiences of the stake-holder group comprised of younger athletes (i.e., high school aged) regarding ath-lete activism. Further, the extent to which athath-letes identify with and internalize elements of athlete activism in their own identities, and whether the issues that elite athletes are protesting and discussing help to form their athlete role identity, has not been studied. Thus, a gap in the literature exists, as the perspectives of high school aged athletes regarding athlete activism have not been qualitatively investigated. Therefore, understanding the perspectives of high school athletes regarding athlete activism is essential. Guided by stakeholder theory (Friedman, Parent & Mason, 2004) and identity theory (Burke & Stets, 2009; Lock & Heere, 2017; Stets & Burke, 2000), we developed the following research question to investigate this important stakeholder group:
RQ1: How do high school athletes in the San Francisco Bay Area perceive, understand, and interact with athlete activism?
Stakeholder theory
Stakeholder theory and stakeholder management was originally developed by Freeman in the early 1980s in response to a rapidly changing business and social
environment in which managers were experiencing “unprecedented levels of environmental turbulence and change” (Freeman & McVea, 2001, p. 1). The guiding tenet of the development of stakeholder theory was the charge of effect-ively managing multiple groups and their resultant relationships in a strategic manner. Indeed, as Freidman, Parent, & Mason (2004) explain, stakeholders of an organization can include any number of individuals or groups; however, not all stakeholder groups are necessarily as important to the success of the focal organ-ization. When considering the industry of professional sport and the business model by which these organizations typically operate, sport participants as well as current and potential sport fans comprise important stakeholder groups for professional sport organizations (Nufer & Buhler, 2010).
From this perspective, current high school athletes fit neatly into the category of primary stakeholders for professional sport organizations (Nufer & Buhler, 2010) while also occupying the generational category of Generation Z (Francis &
Hoefel, 2018). This is an important classification as we do not view high school athletes simply as current or potential participants and fans, but as stakeholders in position to affect change in sport organizations and thus the broader sport industry. Finally, and important to this handbook, the use of stakeholder theory allows the environment and business of sport to be analyzed while avoiding what Freeman (1994) refers to as the “separation thesis,” which states that “we cannot usefully analyze the world of business as if it is separate from the world of ethics or politics” (Freeman & McVea, 2001, p. 26). While stakeholder theory is instru-mental in understanding the importance of high school athletes to professional sport organizations, understanding how these athletes form and activate their individual role identities is equally imperative to understanding their perspective.
Identity
Individuals form much of their identity as a result of the experiences they have throughout their lives (Lock & Heere, 2017). Through these experiences, indi-viduals develop characteristics that collectively serve to form an identity. Burke and Stets (2009) define identity by stating “an identity is a set of meanings that define who one is when one is an occupant of a particular role in society” (p. 3).
Due to the dynamic nature of the social world, Burke and Stets (2009) make explicit that individuals will develop many roles throughout the life course. Of particular relevance to the present study is the notion that high school athletes will continually evolve and adopt different role identities as they move through their athletic and social lives. Indeed, scholars in the area of cultural sport psych-ology have argued that while the athlete’s role is certainly a pivotal aspect of the identity for high school and college athletes, there is also room in for the develop-ment of “athlete- as- citizen” identities (Fisher, Butryn, & Roper, 2003). Further, sport psychology scholars have focused on the relationship college students’
athletic identities with a more activist- oriented identity (Beachy, Brewer, Van Raalte, & Cornelius, 2018). With a similar interest, we endeavor to understand
how high school athletes perceive of and interact with athlete activism. To do so, in the following section, we outline the method used.
Methods
To investigate the research question, we conducted a series of focus groups in order to develop a rich description of high school athletes’ perceptions of ath-lete activism (Barbour, 2007). The focus groups approach allowed for an under-standing of the dialogues that these young student athletes had among friends, teammates, coaches, and family members regarding the rise in athletes’ using their platforms to speak about larger social issues. Focus groups were also chosen due to their ability to facilitate a sense of agency among participants. As Sparkes and Smith (2014) stated, focus groups “can constitute spaces for validating ex-periences that, in turn, could be used to enact political practice or collective resistance” (p. 87). In addition, while focus groups are not always the preferred methodology for examining sensitive issues or topics, scholars have noted that focus groups can allow individuals to have and reflect upon conversations in ways that allow them to “challenge, extend, develop and undermine themselves”
(Sparkes & Smith, 2014, p. 87) in order to arrive at different perspectives, espe-cially “if groups have been convened to reflect on some common attribute or experience that sets them apart from others, thus providing ‘security in numbers’ ” (Barbour, 2007, p. 21).
Similar to Agyemang et al. (2010), we used a purposive convenience sam-pling technique with two inclusion criteria: (1) the participants be members of an athletic team at the high school and (2) each participant be willing to dis-cuss athlete activism. It is notable that initial recruitment attempts which included contextual information specifically referring to Colin Kaepernick received few responses. A second recruitment email was developed which framed the study as an opportunity for high school athletes to talk about “athlete activism” and how they viewed “athletes standing up for causes they believe in.” After the dissemin-ation of the second recruitment email, several responses were received. Ultimately a total of six focus groups with high school athletes (n=31) were conducted, each containing between three and seven participants and lasting between just under one hour to almost one- and- a half hours. Groups were diverse across racial and ethnic identity, gender, sport participation, and (with respect to school) socio-economic status, something that was important given the focus of this study, for as Cooper, Macaulay, and Rodriguez (2019) noted, “examining different types of sport activists and contrasting their engagements with activists outside of sport could provide more insight into the nature/ fluidity and influence of activism” (p. 28).
Results and discussion
We developed three interconnected themes via a thematic analysis of the interview data. These themes represent the complexities of the participants’
understanding of athlete activism, and clearly illustrate how important their interactions with others were in helping them to understand the phenomenon.
The three themes included (semi)educated activism, agency, inspiration and LeBron, and hopeful for change. In the following sections each of the three themes is discussed independently, with a focus on how participants made sense of athlete activism and their own identities within the larger discourses of youth culture and politics.
(Semi)educated activism
The first lengthy conversation that occurred with each of the groups related to how participants made sense of professional athlete protests. To do so, we utilized the NFL protests as an initial entrée, although we explicitly left it open to any of the other forms of athlete activism that have occurred (e.g., NBA, WNBA, women’s soccer). Overall, the data clearly showed that the participants had a basic understanding of what the protests in the NFL were about, including what Colin Kaepernick initially kneeled for, and the protest motivations of the NFL players in 2017. When discussing athletes taking a stand for social justice, all but one group focused specifically on the NFL protests, which speaks as much to the position of football within the U.S. context as it does, perhaps, about the protests themselves. Interestingly, a group comprised of only female athletes, most of whom were basketball players, did mention the 2016– 2017 protests by WNBA players. However, during the early part of each focus group initial discussions of athlete activism resulted in frequent reference and discussion of Colin Kaepernick, as evidenced in this exchange from focus group #3:
P1: I think it’s really cool what they’re doing. I support it totally. People thought of kneeling for the anthem as disrespecting the flag and the mili-tary, but it didn’t have anything to with that. It really has nothing to do with disrespecting the flag. He (Kaepernick) wants equality. He’ll stand once there is equality.
P6: He was more just taking a stand against all the disrespect against the African American community and stuff like that. Everybody took offense to that, like oh how dare you disrespect the flag, but they didn’t even have a clear understanding of it when in reality we should all be supporting this cause and what this protest is.
P2: Going back to what [P1] said, a Marine was the one who told him to take a knee because in the Marine Corps taking a knee is the highest … it’s almost like kneeling to a king. It’s not disrespectful, it’s almost like, I don’t know the word for it.
P6: Like you’re giving honor?
P2: Yeah. Like really high honor. In the media you never hear that … Colin Kaepernick sacrificed his career essentially for the greater good and trying to get his word out in what he believes.
Another important finding was that despite differences in the depth of their understanding of the protests, the students definitely identified with the overall message of the NFL protests and took the protests to heart. Excerpts from mul-tiple conversations also show that the students had a sense of empathy and at least the beginnings of a sense of agency with respect to using their voices as student athletes. Indeed, in contrast to stereotypical notions of post- millennial entitlement, all of the groups contained exchanges that spoke directly to ideas about having a responsibility to take part in larger social change movements. Two examples are provided below:
I feel like it goes back to being able to step into someone’s shoes. I’m not Black, I’m not the one being racially profiled, but there is still that chance that I could be, and that even, for my family, this whole thing that’s happening about immigration … we’re racially profiled in different ways so it resonates with me because if I was in their shoes I wouldn’t want that happening to me. (P2; FG4)
I push myself to be pretty active because I have this idea: You shouldn’t complain if you’re not doing something about it … I feel like educated activism is how we can fix problems, and at least bring it to attention because otherwise people are just going to go with the flow and not make an effort to be a change agent. (P4; FG3)
Sport sociologist and athlete activist, Dr. Harry Edwards, has noted in many interviews that activism without education will not be successful. The following quote aptly describes how certain individuals are developing their own ideas and voices by learning:
People downplay activism like you’re not being civil, but it’s more than that. It’s showing that you care and that it’s not okay. The people who say you shouldn’t be protesting gun violence, go educate yourself on it. I feel like educated activism is how we can fix problems and at least bring it to attention because otherwise people are just going to go with the flow and now make an effort to be a change agent. (P2; FG4)
From the passage above it is clear that high school athletes view themselves as stakeholders in the broad sporting landscape. Though at times they may felt as if their voices weren’t heard – as we saw with certain participants noting their inability to protest due to school rules – many also felt the responsibility to make a difference and to engage at the very least. Whether inspired by LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, or other athletes, the participants viewed athlete activism favorably. Managerially this finding is important because where many leagues and teams may believe the best way to confront athlete activism is to look the other way or disengage, our participants appreciated and engaged with athletes who voiced their opinions, oftentimes viewing them as leaders and aspirational. Our
findings show that for this group of Generation Z individuals athlete activism provided a way to understand and identify with professional athletes. This group of stakeholders aspire to be educated activists and do not see sport as separate from society and certainly do not fault athletes for their activism.
Agency, inspiration, and LeBron
The second major theme was that despite sometimes incomplete notions of exactly what athletes were protesting, participants across all groups viewed a select few (almost all male) athletes as sources of inspiration and role models for their own social agency. Specifically, while most participants noted that Colin Kaepernick’s protests did raise their awareness to issues of police brutality, and somewhat inchoate ideas about social justice, it was NBA star LeBron James who emerged as a key figure whose social justice efforts they resonated with. For many participants, James’ words and actions, mainly on his social media, were the catalyst for the athletes to critically evaluate situations and to realize their voice mattered.
In addition, with the exception of a few African American athletes, the participants in this study, while inspired by James’ use of his platform to speak out for social change, did not necessarily seek to take on the issues that he was speaking about. Rather, they were in awe of James’ engagements on social media, including his calling President Donald Trump a “bum” on Twitter, but they seemed to use James’ as an inspiration to develop their own unique voices as young athletes and to take on the issues which were salient to them. Further, the issues they were concerned about were not, by and large, related to police vio-lence in communities of color, but a range of other issues that affected their lives and families. In speaking of athletes taking on the role of activist in response to being challenged my members of their social circle a participant stated:
I think it’s a tough argument. He’s making so much money. Why’s he doing this? He’s an athlete, not a politician. There’s that one lady who told LeBron to shut and dribble. I was hella pissed. That’s LeBron James. You can’t disres-pect LeBron James like that. And he’s doing it for a positive thing. (P3; FG3) A second participant stated, “You definitely feel more power … we were actually saying something even though it’s just a neighborhood football game. It makes us feel like we’re actually doing something” (P6; FG5).
Based on the results of the focus groups, a common characteristic of the Bay Area High School athlete role identity is to be mindful of inequality and activism. Participants wanted to engage with and provide insight into injustice for marginalized populations to their fellow classmates, family members, and sig-nificant others. These athletes endeavored to carry on work of LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick by developing their own unique voice, activism, and identity,
while maintaining the tenor and inspiration of James’ activism in their actions.
while maintaining the tenor and inspiration of James’ activism in their actions.