An Exploration of Community Within the Context of a University’s Tennis Program

Abstract

Within sport management studies, scholars have overlooked the importance of the involvement and engagement of the surrounding community in relation to sport organizations. Using an ethnographic methodology to guide the research, this study analyzed the conceptualization of a tennis community within the context of a university’s tennis program. The study also explored the power relation and sources of power between a city and university partnership. In particular, this study was guided by the following questions: 1) What has shaped the participants’ subjective understanding of the concept of community around the university’s tennis programs? and 2) How have power dynamics (social, political, economic, cultural) in the context of the community and the university’s tennis program played a role in shaping the meaning-making of community around the university’s tennis program? The methods used to answer the research questions included six months of ethnographic participant observations, 23 semi-structured interviews, and records kept through a research journal. Analysis of the data, generated results that have been developed into two separate manuscripts. The first manuscript showed the factors identified by the community members in the development of place identity with the Tennis Complex. The second manuscript presented the way in which sources of power were created within the community and the ways in which power has been exercised in the research context. Overall findings serve to provide leaders of sport organizations with additional evidence-base literature emphasizing the several benefits of community, the importance of place and identity, the strategies to adapt for community engagement, and the importance of partnerships and forms of collaborations.