Sports Studies Commons^™

The Economics Of Modern Basketball Fandom, Holden Velasco

Capstones

In an increasingly money-sucking economy, many Americans are feeling the aching of their wallets. Basketball, once serving as an escape from the outside world, has now turned into a money-making machine where fans are paying to keep it running. It’s inescapable, whether it’s the rising costs to watch the professionals, forking thousands of dollars for children to play or sports gambling being plastered everywhere. Basketball no longer feels like basketball.

Rethinking Road Racing Standards: Comparing New York Road Runners Race Results To Running Industry Standards, Jennie Coughlin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Running has undergone a third boom in participation since 2020, driven largely by people seeking fitness options that were outside and socially distanced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media has also allowed runners from groups that did not traditionally participate to find community. As the road racing population has expanded to include more people, some road racing industry standards have not kept up. This project assesses what the road racing community looks like and measures industry standards against the community of participants to see what changes in those standards would be needed to make them inclusive for all participants.

To …

The New York City Fields Of Calcio Libero: Where Protagonists Activate Counter-Hegemony, Olivia Soderini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Derivative from a deeply rooted calcio (“football”/ “soccer”) passion, with years of associated empiricism in diverse contexts, as well as from a profound intellectual interest in examining (im)migratory trends through interdisciplinary lenses, stems the development of this project’s topical focus and multi-dimensional argument. My calcio experiences, further combined with my interest in and knowledge of political and critical theory, served as the converged impetus of recognizing what already exists and is thriving: (im)migrant protagonism and counter-hegemony by way of New York City (“NYC”) calcio libero.[1] This project embarks on a creative autoethnographic and analytical journey to explore pickup’s …

Flotsam And Jetsam: The Role Of Mlb Integration In The Wreckage Of The Negro Leagues, Nastasia Pollas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“We are the ship, all else the sea.” Adapted from a Frederick Douglass speech, this quote by Rube Foster became the slogan of the Negro Leagues, illustrating the resolve and determination to prosper alone during a time of segregation. Setting aside long-standing rivalry and strife, Black baseball teams united under a shared vision of forming the first professional Black baseball league.

This paper examines how Giddens' structuration theory, connecting social structures with individual actions, can explain both the development and success of the league under segregation and its eventual demise during integration.

The Hecks Angels: A Look At The City Of New York's Electric Motorcycle Community, Mckenzie A. Corey

Capstones

Motorcycles are a common mode of transportation globally, but within the U.S., they tend to imply a certain demeanor—maybe someone who's brash or a risk taker. I mean, it makes sense. You've got to be a bit daring to ride off into the sunset on something that screams when it shifts gears and begs to be revved at a red light. But in New York City electric motorcycle enthusiasts appear to have slapped a fresh coat of paint on the old concept of what it means to live a life on two wheels.

Visualizing The Rise Of American Women's Soccer, Hoi Wah Tang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The rise of American women’s soccer is a compelling narrative of determination, talent, and triumph on the global stage. From the inaugural FIFA Women’s World Cup in 1991 to the ongoing dominance of the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT), this journey encapsulates not only athletic excellence but also the broader struggles for equality, representation, and respect in sports.

This project aims to bring this story to life by presenting a rich tapestry of data visualizations, timelines, and multimedia elements that showcase key moments, players, and milestones. Through engaging graphics and interactive features, users will explore how the sport evolved, the …

Clacls Reportage, Vol. 1, Fall 2024, Pierina Pighi Bel, Phoenix Paz, Ana María Granados Romero

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

This publication unites three compelling articles that offer diverse perspectives and a shared dedication to bridging the gap between academic research and public engagement.

Phoenix Paz presents a vivid ethnographic account of recent migrants in New York City, revealing how state inefficiencies marginalize a sector that contributes daily to the city’s economy.

Pierina Pighi Bel explores the growing appeal of the Republican Party among Latino voters in election cycles, delving into the complexities and inherent contradictions within this trend.

Ana María Granados Romero provides profound insights into migration, gender, and domestic work through her exploration of "La Parada"—a corner in …

Who Are You Rooting For? T20 Cricket World Cup 2024, Usa & Wi, Purvesh Desai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The T20 Cricket World Cup '24 played in USA & WI will bring immense excitement to the cricket lovers around the world and have a question to themselves “Who shall I Root for?” How do people or fans support their favorite teams and on what criteria do they pick these teams will discuss in here.

Patriotism, tradition, and favorite individual players, are the main reasons for the fans to choose their and support the team. Nation is the biggest pride of an individual and many people choose their pride over everything. People celebrate when the home team plays on the …

Rpe-3100 Therapeutic Recreation For Individuals With Disabilities I, Mary Lou Fierle Ms.

Open Educational Resources

This is the syllabus for the course RPE-3100 Therapeutic Recreation for Individuals with Disabilities I

Bridge The Gap: Using Advocacy To Bridge The Gender Wage Gap In Sports - A Comparative Analysis Of Venus Williams And The Us Women’S National Team, William E. Mitchell

Student Theses and Dissertations

For decades sports and activism have been synonymous. Many remember Jesse Owens and Tommie Smith’s Olympic protests, Mohammed Ali’s anti-war protest and Collin Kaepernick kneeling to bring attention to racial injustices. More recently many joined in celebration and applauded when the US Women’s National Team secured equal pay. However, many women in sports remain invisible. Activism is a viable form of seeking change, but can the route taken by Venus Williams work in team sports? This project will seek to examine if activism is a viable change agent in sports especially in closing the gender pay gap. While several female …

The Matriarchs Of Ecuavoley Femenino, Mariana Martinez

Capstones

At Cancha Chavelita (Chavelita Court) in the Bronx, New York, generations of Ecuadorean women have come together to play ecuavoley, a male-dominated sport from Ecuador. Ironically, the court however happens to also be one of the few run by a woman, Chavelita herself. As the women embrace the sport, they’ve become more than just teammates on the court. The capstone project also documents the history of ecuavoley femenino (female ecuavoley) in Ecuador with an in-depth podcast featuring Mercedes (Meche) Mena, a professional ecuavoley player. A third component of the project also explores the rise of ecuavoley femenino on the internet …

Hoops Recruitment: Can Nyc Regain Glory Days With “Theprogramnyc”?, Christian I. Nazario

Capstones

TheProgramNYC is looking to revitalize the Basketball scene in New York City. Founders Jared Effron and Griffin Taylor grew up together as friends and saw the failures of the New York Knicks in the nineties. Effron and Taylor made it there goal to train the youth in order to recreate thew New York Basketball scene.The article details some history of New York City Basketball.

Wave-Ing Away Stereotypes: The Rise Of Black Surfers, John J. Schilling Iii

Capstones

This article examines the growing prominence of Black surfers with a specific focus on Lou Harris of the Black Surfing Association East Coast Chapter in Rockaway Beach, New York. While the sport remains white male-dominated, a 2022 report from the Surf Industry Members Association and ActionWatch show that surfing has experienced a surge in diversity over the last decade with an increase in the number of Black surfers, female surfers and other surfers of color nationwide. In exploring this phenomenon, this article includes the historical background of Black people’s connection to the sport, dating back to enslaved Africans’ complicated interactions …

“Once That Ball Goes Flat, What Are You Gonna Do?” How Being A Student-Athlete Uniquely Affects Black Men, Amaya S. Mcdonald

Capstones

With less experience in the world outside of sports as compared to their non-athlete peers, student-athletes are often left to find careers in other fields where they may be unprepared after college.This trend disproportionately affects Black male college-athletes, who make up a majority of the student-athletes on revenue sports teams, like basketball and football, which generate billions of dollars for academic institutions.

Interviews with former student-athletes, activists and educators reveal the source of this disparity and how the student-athlete role can affect a student's college experience, their own self-perception and their transition into a life without sports post-graduation. https://medium.com/@amayamcd24/once-that-ball-goes-flat-what-are-you-gonna-do-1f0baaa14cf4

Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward …

La Descortesía En Los Comentarios Digitales De La Prensa Deportiva. El Tenis, Mucho Más Que Un Juego, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Comments on sports news published on the digital platforms of newspapers have turned these spaces into forums for debate in which homogeneous social communities are established. The aim of this research is to find out how the participants of these platforms interact in the sports press and what impoliteness strategies they use when evaluating the text of the news and the comments of other users. For this purpose, a qualitative textual analysis of a corpus of 1,000 digital comments produced on the Australian Open 2022 final in four of the most widely distributed Spanish newspapers with the highest national circulation, …

Football Can Save America, Francisco Attie

Capstones

Looking to cure the malaise of our day, I went to the football game, and, in the dying breaths of the match, found something much greater. https://medium.com/@Fran_Attie/football-can-save-america-2bb918f19a97

New York Running, Kellen Bulger

Capstones

My community is the New York City running community. This includes everyone from casual joggers to high school track athletes to folks training for an ultramarathon. The community also encompasses all five boroughs. For my community practicum project, I plan to host my second event/run in the community, where we will discuss the overall state of the running community in NYC. The successes, shortcomings, frustrations, and whatever else is on our minds. As I did with the last event, the discussion that takes place after our run will be loosely structured around this community-wide callout I distributed in the spring …

Play: A Normative Theory Of Agency And Culture, Maxaie Belmont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From the beginning, people are introduced to many different attempts at engaging with various “cultures”, and of course, are born into their own. The extant literature of various fields in the social sciences have afforded us the realization that no one culture holds neither moral ground nor blueprint for how to be a culture, as our own culture is one of many, all a part of the world. Yet, because of the way our culture specifies how we are to engage and live, we tend towards the assumption that our culture has monopoly on the definition of culture. The following …

Carceral Calisthenics: Physical Culture In The Hood, Albert L. De La Tierra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How do racialized men who reside in structurally marginalized locales that are putatively regarded as “the hood” navigate and manage their social conditions? This dissertation sheds light on this question by treating “street workout,” a physical culture centered around calisthenics exercises performed in public space, as an empirical site for generating a situated understanding of how some Black men assert themselves in social space at the same time that they are asserted upon by social forces. Taking an ethico-onto-epistem-ological stance that refuses the colonial gaze (a ubiquitously employed optic that dehumanizes racialized people), this dissertation asks: (1) What embodied practices …

Gender-Typing And Sports: The Perception Of Gender For Group And Individual Sports Among College Students And Adults, Nicki Zenker

Theses and Dissertations

While female sports have continued to rise since the passing of Title IX, there is still a perception that sports are a domain for men. This study seeks to expand on previous research and provide an update on how sports are viewed in the U.S in light of gender norms.

A Day At The Races In Black And White: How An 1898 Horse Race Led To A Whipping, A Lawsuit, And A 1901 Arrest, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

After losing an 1898 horse race in the Bronx, New York, African-American jockey Alonzo ‘Lonnie’ Clayton, who had won the Kentucky Derby in 1892 at the age of fifteen, heard an insult from the crowd along the rail and struck a white spectator from Brooklyn across the face with his riding whip. The blow resulted in a two hundred dollar fine by the track stewards, but ultimately led to a civil trial, a financial judgment against Clayton that he ignored, and then an arrest and incarceration for non-payment of the judgment, which some writers mistakenly still claim was for race-fixing. …

Relationships Between Sports, Physical Activity Participation, And Phys-Ed Gpa: Results And Analyses From A National Sample Of Asian American Students, Howard Z. Zeng, Raymond E. Weston, Juan Battle

Publications and Research

Relationships among sports, physical activity (PA) participation, and educational outcomes have been studied in various venues, however, used a longitudinal method with a national sample of Asian-American High-School Students (AAHSS) was barely covered. This study employed the latest National High-School Longitudinal Study data (Participants, N = 950); hierarchical regression modeling and intersectionality theory examined, analyzed, and evaluated the relationships among sports, PA participation, and the outcomes on the physical education grade point average (Phys-Ed GPA). Moreover, the demographics factors impact on the participants' Phys-Ed GPA was also analyzed and evaluated. The primary results included: 1) the female students who participate …

Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis

Theses and Dissertations

Where similarities in class struggle have historically operated as a unifying force globally, the American crafted mythos isolates the individual and dehumanizes those that do not fall within the parameters of the cowboy archetype. The national protagonist is turned into a class traitor and an extension of government power.

Three Iona Prep Football Players: Three Different Paths To College, Fiifi Frimpong

Capstones

The project accentuates the difficulties high school football student-athletes are facing amid the coronavirus pandemic. It focuses on Iona Prep athletes who had their recruiting processes interrupted because of the obstacles resulting from that spread of the virus in New York and North America. Governor Cuomo suspended NY football seasons and recruiting visits were affected, putting the city's athletes at a disadvantage compared to athletes in different states not stopped from shutdowns.

The Fourth Wall Of Jericho: Wrestling With Covid, Cheyenne R. Ubiera

Capstones

COVID has affected everyone in the world in some shape or form. The Fourth Wall of Jericho hones in on independent wrestlers whose lives have been altered due to the virus — a rookie whose been down on his luck in kick-starting his career and frequent worker whose using the extra time in quarantine to get better at the craft.

The Fourth Wall of Jericho breaks the fourth wall of pro wrestling in an effort take a look a wrestler’s lives outside of the ring

Baseball Has A Race Problem: The Decline Of African-Americans In Baseball, Ariel Pacheco

Capstones

African-Americans have been on a decline in the sport of baseball since the 1980’s. Of the 900 players on the 2020 opening day rosters, only 65 were African American. There are currently only two Black managers and one Black general manager in the MLB. As other sports like basketball and baseball continue to rise in popularity, baseball has staggered. The question remains, what is baseball doing wrong? Is it too expensive? Is it simply not inviting to African-Americans? And what, if anything, can be done to curtail these numbers?

Dependability Of Referees’ Decision Making On Discretionary Penalties In The Nfl, Anthony Stefanidis

Theses and Dissertations

This paper predicts the possibilities of specific penalty types occurring, using a logistic regression model, and evaluates whether there is any possible bias towards teams by referees' decision making. Using penalties that occurred from 2009 until 2018, there seems to be a bias towards teams which are part of larger markets. How successful the team is and how famous some of the players are can also possibly affect the odds of a referee making a penalty call. Due to how underdeveloped the area of research is, there are many ways to expand it to essentially bring further light to whether …

The Fight Before The Fight: Weight-Cutting In Mixed Martial Arts, Michael T. Desantis

Capstones

For professional mixed martial artists, fighting may not even be the most dangerous aspect of the job. Many of these athletes consider weight-cutting to be a fight itself, one that could have deadly consequences. Fighters, coaches, doctors, nutritionists and other experts discuss the state of weight-cutting in MMA, why it's done, how it's dangerous, and the potential solutions to making it safer.

https://medium.com/@michaeltdesantis24/the-fight-before-the-fight-weight-cutting-in-mixed-martial-arts-6a920ad5e37b

Biased, Janessa M. Andiorio Ms.

Capstones

BIASED is a journalistic podcast focused on intertwining journalistic reporting with opinion to explore the bad behaviors and entitled attitudes that comes with athletic status and how it develops. By talking with coaches, current and former athletes and sport sociology exports this project explores how athletes view themselves as well as how society enables certain sport culture.

https://jandiorio194.wixsite.com/biased