Fields of Play: An Ethnography of Children's Sports

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Using an updated version of Kurt Levin's field theory to guide his work, Dyke ... tematizing of Sport in Canada” (Chapter 2) he devotes full chapters to (a) parents.
Sociology of Sport Journal, 2015, 32, 110  -111 http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2014-0044 © 2015 Human Kinetics, Inc.

Official Journal of NASSS www.SSJ-Journal.com BOOK REVIEW

Fields of Play: An Ethnography of Children’s Sports By Noel Dyke. University of Toronto Press, 2012, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Reviewed by Jay Coakley, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Adult-organized competitive youth soccer is a pervasive activity worldwide. Children we know play it; we observe, discuss, and critique it; and then we turn our analytical attention elsewhere. Fortunately, anthropologist Noel Dyke has not followed in our footsteps. From his vantage point in a Lower Mainland suburban area in British Columbia and with his skills as an ethnographer, Dyke immersed himself into a localized world of youth soccer. Overall, he spent two decades recording and making sense of his observations, conversations, and interviews with the adults and young people whose lives come together in the complex social field of community-based youth soccer programs. Using an updated version of Kurt Levin’s field theory to guide his work, Dyke set out to understand “how and why community sports for children and youth in Canada take the forms they do” (p.19). To that end he examined the multifaceted processes through which these sports are socially constructed, given meaning, and integrated into people’s lives and the larger contexts of community and society. The result for me is the most insightful analysis of youth sports since Gary Alan Fine’s With the Boys (1986). What I appreciated most about Dyke’s deep, critical, and self-reflexive ethnography is his ability to move seamlessly between the macro and micro levels of analysis. For example, he views youth sports in terms of the intent and reality of public policy in Canada and British Columbia and then follows relevant discursive paths into the everyday lives of the young people and adults on playing fields, sidelines, and family homes. He moves from the “cornucopia of claims concerning the benefits of sport” (p.38) through the institutionalized youth sport delivery system into the reality of youth sports for those who produce and reproduce them. Parents, organizers and coaches, and athletes are insightfully described in context with sensitivity to their humanity and circumstances. Their perspectives and experiences are explored in ways that put readers into their shoes and then walk them through their choices related to youth sports. In the process he shows how youth sports have come to be perceived by a wide array of people as “mechanism that provides whatever might be desired” (p. 38). After introducing his methods and theoretical approach and explaining the “Systematizing of Sport in Canada” (Chapter 2) he devotes full chapters to (a) parents and parenting; (b) organizers, coaches, and coaching; and (c) athletes and playing. I highlighted and made margin notes to identify the numerous insights in each of these chapters, but the chapter on “Becoming Athletes and Players” captured more highlighting and notes than the others. This is where Dyke is especially good. He takes the young people in his ethnography very seriously as co-producers of organized youth soccer. Adults are clearly in control in terms of power, authority, and making organized soccer possible, but he explains that it is the young people who decide what they want 110

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from their experiences, how they give them meaning, and how those meanings change from one young person to the next and from situation to situation for any given player. One of my favorite themes in Fields of Play is that “girls and boys need to be recognized as close observers of what various adults might want and expect from them as children as well as skilled social actors in their own right” (p. 102). As a result, the young players are not “just passengers who are along for and adult navigated ride through community sports.” Instead, Dyke notes, they are “committed participants who attempt to prioritize their own objectives by means of the careers they construct for themselves in community sports” (p. 115). It is in this section of his ethnography that Dyke demonstrates his careful listening skills and his ability to hear what young people say about their sport experiences. As a result, he provides many useful insights into parent-child and coach-athlete relationships. Through these chapters, Dyke acknowledges that youth sports are sites at which some adults pursue their interests as they use the rhetorical justification that “this is all for the kids” (p. 159). But he also notes the “countless instances of parents and other adults diligently seeking to do the right thing with and for children through community sports” (p. 159). Overall, Dyke concludes that “community sport is, among other things, a social field replete with talk about dreams and dreaming” (p. 168). It is this “dream talk” that unites people in producing the joy, satisfaction, prestige, moral worth, and material opportunities often associated with youth sports. For most of the adults and children in Dyke’s ethnography, the dreams trump the problems, conflicts, tensions, and disappointments. Page after page, Dyke provides insights into youth sports and the people who play, coach, organize, and otherwise support them. These insights emerge out of twenty years of systematic collection of data combined with critical analysis guided by self-reflexivity. Unlike those who make assumptions about what youth sports do for young people, Dyke never deviates from his conviction that the meanings and consequences of youth sports are grounded in the organization and dynamics of social relationships. For this reason, he captures the complex processes that characterize adult-child relationships and the agency of young people who navigate their involvement in sports as well as their relationships with parents, coaches, and other adults whose positions and power constitute the structure of youth sports. Beyond youth sports, Dyke acknowledges the ways that “conventional modes of thinking about childhood and youth . . . serve to complicate and in some respects obscure relations between actual children and adults” (p. 102). For this reason, he does not try to classify or categorize the actors in his ethnography. Instead, Dyke takes them at their word as individuals. And what the reader receives is an analysis that serves as an invaluable alternative to the hundreds of “policy documents and published analyses concerning child and youth sports [that are] pumped out in profusion by government agencies, recreational departments, national and international sport organizations, entrepreneurial sport experts, and the burgeoning public-private sport industry . . .” (p. 159). Although Dyke collected his data in Canada, his analysis is applicable to organized soccer programs in the United States and other neoliberalized, wealthy nations. Therefore, it is useful for both instructors and practitioners in the areas of childhood studies, sport and development, and the sociology and anthropology of sport, the family, and community. For me, Dykes book is a key source for understanding changes in the culture of play among children in North America in particular.