Narratives of young coaches’ participation rights in sports clubs: negotiating the liminal spaces of childhood and adulthood

Youth’s participation in, and drop-out from, grassroots sport has attracted considerable attention from scholars. Yet, there has been little focus on youth as rights bearers, in particular, research on young people’s participation rights. This article examines how young coaches and other significant actors in sports clubs (e.g. managers, adult coaches, parents, children) discursively construct youths’ right to be heard in all matters that affect them, acknowledging that free expression is a precondition for realizing all other rights (UNCRC 1989). Young coaches represent an interesting case to study because they are classified as children with specific rights, yet in their role as coaches they are authority figures for children. The study’s premise is that children have a right to play and participate in meaningful leisure, as well as a right to be heard and numerous other rights, but the processes involved in realizing these rights are saturated by power imbalances and micropolitics. Thus, from a critical narrative perspective, it asks, ‘how is young coaches’ ‘right to be heard’ narrated, what discourses are drawn upon and what subject positions are made available?’ The critical discourse analysis reveals that narratives about youths’ ‘right to be heard’ are seemingly scarce. Taken-for-granted ‘Truths’ about traditional forms of competitive sport and persistent narratives that valorize adult knowledge, often casting youth as ‘incompetents’/’immature’ and lacking a capacity to express a valid opinion, are more common. In addition, current neoliberal pressures for clubs to commodify children’s sport, can be seen to displace ideas that promote forms of governance in which power can be shared across generations.