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Coaches from both the professional and college ranks are often put forth as archetypal examples of effective leaders – individuals’ whose behaviors, styles, and wisdom provide the ever elusive playbook for how to successfully lead others. While numerous books and articles in the popular press put forth advice from leaders in the sports world, numerous empirical studies of the drivers of successful sports leadership and the factors that contribute to leader success in the context of sports have also been conducted. In this chapter, we first provide a broad review of empirical leadership research conducted within the sports world and examine how research within the sports context provides a suitable and advantageous setting for leadership research in general. Second, we offer a road map of opportunities for future leadership studies within the context of sports. The goal of this chapter is to stimulate and rally more thought-provoking research related to leadership in sports that generates insights for organizational leadership across contexts.

The intent of this chapter is to examine the historical and present-day intersections of injury, impairment, pain and risk-taking in the Paralympic Movement. While much has been written about injuries that end an athlete’s career, far less consideration has been given to how an injury might launch a sports career. In this chapter, I explore the experiences of athletes for whom injury and sports participation are fundamentally entwined.

To accomplish this, I draw on sociological literature on sport and injury, psychological literature on identities and sport retirement and feminist disability theories. The discussion is further enriched by interviews with Paralympic athletes and informed by own experience as a researcher, guide and volunteer in the Paralympic Movement.

This work illustrates how systems of representation intersect to (re)produce identities. This includes demonstrating how some individuals use sport as a means of claiming an athletic identity while distancing themselves from devalued disabled identities and the subsequent impact this can have on their psycho-social well-being.

This chapter demonstrates how sociologists of sports can engage with critical disability scholarship to deepen understandings of how and why individuals with impairments enter into sport and their experiences therein.

This research work explores the perception of children's experiences as spectators of a sporting event. The study focusses on the 19th Mediterranean Games hosted by Oran in the summer of 2022 and aims to analyse the trace of emotions and memories that the event left in their minds. A qualitative survey was conducted with 22 resident children who attended the event as spectators. The results show that a child's experience at a sporting event is holistic, appearing in several dimensions: a cognitive dimension, referring to what the child learnt from the event, and an affective dimension, which is important for creating strong and meaningful experiences for children at sporting events.

To explore what suffering is, how suffering is embedded within the sociology of sport literature, and what suffering can do to athletes in sport. In addition, to discuss the value of an interdisciplinary approach and co-presence when researching athletes in suffering.

In the first part of the chapter, the concepts of pain, violence, and suffering are separated, and a justification for the study of suffering in sport is given. The second part of the chapter details sport and social problems, and the suffering body in sport is discussed, pulling from interdisciplinary theories and methodologies of suffering external to the sociology of sport.

Social inequalities and hidden forms of suffering may be reproduced in sport. Sport is questioned as a force of social mobility for vulnerable people. The context of sport can offer ‘healing’ properties for people in suffering. The impact of using an interdisciplinary approach and considering co-presence and relational suffering when researching suffering is discussed.

The difficulties understanding the complex, multi-dimensional nature of suffering are shared. New ways of engaging within the research act and specific theoretical approaches are suggested for improving the understanding of suffering within sport.

There has been increasing interest in sport entrepreneurship as a field of study due to the way it bridges theory and practice. This is certainly relevant in the startup context that emphasizes an entrepreneurial approach for developing a business model. This chapter focuses on the importance of sport to society by focusing on entrepreneurship, thereby connecting the sport entrepreneurship literature to the new field of startups. This enables a better understanding about the value of entrepreneurship to the sport industry and in particularly the startup culture.

The aim of this chapter is to examine and challenge the fairness rhetoric used by many US lawmakers to prevent trans girls and women from participating in school sports. Legislators embrace faulty scientific claims to assert unfairness based on physiology and many sport philosophers work from the premise that the first priority of sport is to be competitively fair. We argue that this is a misguided notion and that sport must be just before it can be fair. Using Iris Marion Young's framework of justice, we contend that excluding trans athletes from school sport is an injustice. We propose that focusing on the eradication of injustice is the ethical path forward for the inclusion and full participation of trans people in sport.

To explore the connections between sport, sustainability and international development through critical understandings of the place of the environment within the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) sector. The chapter explores both the forces (historical, social, political, economic) and actors (the UN, IOC) that help to explain the current and increasing connections between sport and sustainable development, before assessing the current state of SDP through three themes: the place of environmentalism in development, sustainable development in/through sport and the trend towards ecological modernization in the sporting sector and beyond.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature from sport, sustainability and international development to provide historical, contemporary and future-oriented assessments of sport and sustainable development.

By framing the sustainability of sport and SDP in terms of the contestability of its political formations, such as ecological modernization, the chapter considers and discusses (potentially) sustainable futures, particularly those informed by the implications of recognizing a New Climatic Regime.

The chapter argues for a number of future areas of study that may push the boundaries of existing research in the area.

The chapter provides one of the first introductions of the idea of a New Climatic Regime within the context of sport and the SDP sector, and argues that within such a political frame, sport cannot exist separately from the environment. As a result, the chapter advances the argument that the SDP sector should now consider itself to be part of the environment, rather than steward of or over it.

Pain is demonstrated as a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon that is interdependent and connected between people. The author proposes that social scientists use a “total model” of pain to better understand pain epistemologically and ontologically and people’s “pain lives.” Through this model, and drawing from the author’s own research on mixed martial artists, new ways to conceptualize, study, and talk about pain within the sporting context have been outlined.

In the first part of this chapter, pain is discussed with respect to how it has been researched and understood within the fields of medicine, sport psychology, and the sociology of sport. In the second part of this chapter, the total pain model developed by Dame Cicely Saunders is explored as a revolutionary development for the ways in which pain is understood and treated within the health field. Lastly, the author proposes a reconstructed methodology for the study of pain.

Pain should be studied not from one tradition, but using an amalgamation of the medical, sport psychology, and sociology of sport traditions and perspectives. In this way, the many dimensions of the phenomenon, social, cultural, political, material/physical, spiritual, existential, emotional, and cognitive must be explored from all systems and languages of pain in order to achieve a more robust understanding of pain in sport.

The dualistic relationship between theory and method currently present in most qualitative research does not fully account for the complexity of bodies in pain. Therefore, it is critical to adopt an interwoven methodological and theoretical approach that enables scholars to relate to, and feel with, people in pain.