Making sense of development: Youth and adult narratives on sport-based youth development programs

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Sport-based youth development (SBYD) programs are widely promoted as vehicles for positive youth development, particularly for youth from socioeconomically marginalized communities. While existing research frequently reports favorable developmental outcomes, less attention has been given to how youth themselves make sense of their experiences within these programs and how such meanings may shift over time. Using a community-based participatory approach, semi-structure interviews were conducted with nine Black youth currently enrolled in SBYD programs and four Black adult facilitators who had participated in similar programs during their youth. A youth advisory board, composed of young adults from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, served as co-analysts throughout data interpretation. Narrative analysis resulted in the construction of six composite narratives organized into pairs (youth narratives and adult counter-narratives) that captured patterned ways youth and adult participants made sense of their experiences within SBYD contexts. Findings revealed important differences in meaning-making across time. Youth participants largely reproduced dominant narratives framing sport as inherently developmental, emphasizing internal skills such as confidence, resilience, and social belonging, while adult participants retrospectively articulated counternarratives that highlighted conditional support, institutional neglect, and the limited conversion of sport participation into long-term social mobility. These narratives illustrate how development is not a fixed outcome of program participation, but an evolving process of sensemaking shaped by positionality, experience, and structural context.