Browsing by Subject "Sports"
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Item A Comparative Analysis of Three Levels (High School, College, Professional) of Coaches' Perceptions of Their Athletes' Self-Efficacy and Confidence(2013) Kafka, Nathan Henry; Guldbrandsen, Frank; Rauschenfels, DianeThe longstanding question within sports and baseball is what separates the good athletes from the great ones. The purpose of this study was to look at the role self-efficacy and self-confidence play in the success of athletes. This study was solely based on the coaches’ perspective of their athletes. Three coaches who coach at different levels (high school, college, professional) were interviewed for this study. All of these coaches have a proven track record for success and have had the opportunity to work with thousands of players. These coaches, along with what research suggests, give us an interesting perspective on what separates good from great high school, college, and professional baseball players. Although self-efficacy and self-confidence are important, there are other factors that contribute to the success of athletes at each level respectively.Item The Effects of Second Screen Use on the Enjoyment of the Super Bowl(2015-05) Dolbin, JordanGiven the prevalence of second screen use, both scholars and industry professionals have become increasingly interested in its impact in different media contexts. While many of the previous studies have addressed cognitive outcomes, few have addressed effects beyond those. The current study addresses this void by exploring how second screen use affects the enjoyment of watching the Super Bowl. Some key factors explored in this study include how frequently viewers used a second screen during the game, whether the second screen activity was related or unrelated to the game, and the consistency between a viewer's second screen uses and their motivations for watching the game. The study's findings suggest that while general frequency of second screen use is negatively related to enjoyment, related second screen use positively predicts enjoyment. Furthermore, the greater the consistency between viewers' second screen uses and motivations for viewing the game, the greater their enjoyment is.Item Forty Years on the basis of sex: Title IX, the "Female Athlete" and the Political Construction of Sex and Gender(2013-08) Sharrow, ElizabethThis project employs a policy feedback framework to analyze how American political institutions grapple with inequities in educational settings, and how policy design and implementation matter for social change. Using archival data and quantitative data, I explore how political battles over the implementation of Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 have shifted social and political understandings of sex and gender. I argue that battles over the implementation and meanings of the law's application to athletics have recursively altered political meanings of sexed bodies and political repertoires of gender. Further, debates over the meaning of policy have constituted the "female athlete" as a political figure germane to Title IX's policy domain, as well as broader social change over the past forty years. This dissertation historicizes the politics of Title IX, focusing mainly on the implicit definition and application of its central clause, "on the basis of sex", to the domain of athletics (and sports vis-à-vis classrooms). Throughout, the work is guided by my main research question: How have battles over the implementation of Title IX altered political and social understandings of sex and gender? Each chapter analyzes a different decade in order to illustrate the difficulties in settling cultural change (especially to gender roles) through political intervention and rights-based legislation. Attention to the politics of sex inherent to sports in Title IX illustrates how policy has cemented certain embodied understandings of what sex (and sex at the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and ability) means. In sports, "sex" is defined as a category of the body, and this meaning has been re-naturalized through political battles of the past forty years. Athletics were not mentioned in the original congressional legislation, but institutions of American government charged with implementing the law quickly became embroiled in debates over how to address severe disparities in college athletic opportunities between women and men. Throughout the 1970s, sports emerged as the most politically contentious realm of Title IX's implementation. Over the past forty years, the application of the law to sports has fueled more persistent political clashes regarding the meaning of equality than has its application to educational settings. I argue that a tension between "sex-blind" enforcement in education and "sex-conscious" guidelines for sport continues to fuel political battles over the law. Consequently, this policy designed to end discrimination "on the basis of sex" came to naturalize sex as a characteristic of bodies. Title IX's policy design did so in the realm of sports, but not in classrooms. Classrooms were by and large sex-integrated, educating girls and boys in the same spaces "regardless of their sex". Sports, were sex-segregated, first dividing girls from boys into different spaces, "by virtue of their sex". This on-going mechanism of policy design constitutes what I refer to as the "Paradox of Title IX", and this work demonstrates how it has developed and been reified through political battles over the policy. The history of sports as a U.S. policy domain demonstrates how policy development and political battles can come to generate unexpected and uneven outcomes and tensions, even within purportedly "successful" policy interventions. Although Title IX has had many positive outcomes, applying an intersectional lens helps to understand some of the law's on-going limitations.Item Graph Labelings and Tournament Scheduling(2015-05) Shepanik, AaronDuring my research I studied and became familiar with distance magic and distance antimagic labelings and their relation to tournament scheduling. Roughly speaking, the relation is as follows. Let the vertices on the graph represent teams in a tournament, and let an edge between two vertices a and b represent that team a will play team b in the tournament. Further, suppose we can rank the teams based on previous games, say, the preceding season. These integer rankings become labels for the vertices. Of particular interest were handicap tournaments, that is, tournaments designed to give each team a more balanced chance of winning.Item Interview with Harvey Mackay(University of Minnesota, 1999-06-18) Mackay, Harvey; Pflaum, Ann M.Ann Pflaum interviews Harvey Mackay, president of Mackay Envelope, university alumnus, former president of the Alumni Association, and a well known author.Item Serving, informing, and inspiring today’s female athlete and fan postfeminist, neoliberal discourse: a critical media analysis of espnW(2012-10) Wolter, Sarah MarieESPN, Inc. uses espnW to shape discourse about female athletes as postfeminist and neoliberal subjects in the context of further normalizing sport as a masculine institution. Language in espnW articles is a principle activity by which this ideology is circulated and reproduced. Ideology fuels hegemonic conceptions of sport that benefit dominant groups such as corporations, sports media organizations, and sports leagues affiliated with ESPN, Inc. Discourse influences how individuals in our culture think about, behave towards, and support/do not support women's sports, so discourse contributes to female athletes and female fans as marginalized.