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Translating care from policy to practice: limits and lessons from an institutional ethnographic study examining Ontario youth volleyball

ABSTRACT Socio-cultural research on athlete maltreatment is well documented, with much work focused on examining the spectrum of mistreatment and programmatic/policy responses. While some sport governing bodies have implemented a ‘duty of care’ approach, more definitional analyses of care and caring in competitive youth sport remain absent. This gap served as point of departure for an institutional ethnographic study designed to examine practices of care and caring within the context of youth competitive volleyball through a socio-philosophical lens. Informed by the philosophical frameworks espoused in the Ethics of Care and the Ethics of Need, this paper utilises textual and interview data from the larger study to examine how athletes, coaches, and parents interpret and practice care in relationship to notions of care established in the sport organisation’s governing policies. The results showed how, at the institutional level, notions of care expressed in the sport organisation’s governing documents focused more so on identifying and preventing uncaring practices rather than illuminating what constitutes care and caring, while participants negotiated and interpreted their lived experiences of care as the prioritisation of the needs of athletes over the performance imperative. This was particularly true for coaches who were dually tasked with the care-taking of youth athletes on their teams, whilst also ensuring performance success on the playing field. Thus, coaches are responsible for practices of care in situ that are not fulsomely addressed in governing policies, which presents challenges for coaches when balancing athletes’ needs while also adhering to the aims of competitive sport.