IntroductionCommunity sport organizations – encompassing grassroots, recreational, amateur and voluntary clubs and settings distinct from elite or professional sport – are increasingly positioned as sites for advancing social inclusion, health and wellbeing, yet the role of organizational culture in enabling or constraining these outcomes is not fully understood. While policy and practice increasingly call for culture change in community sport, the extent to which such efforts have been empirically evaluated remains unknown.MethodsA systematic review was conducted across five databases (PubMed, SPORTDiscus, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Scopus) from inception to June 2025. Studies were included if they evaluated an intentional strategy described as aiming to change culture in community sport settings and reported participant- or organizational-level outcomes. During title/abstract screening by reviewers, records were prioritized using machine-learning algorithms to rank relevance. Study quality was appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool.ResultsTwelve studies met inclusion criteria. Most were qualitative, small-scale, and context-specific. Culture change efforts clustered thematically around: (i) integrity and safety cultures, (ii) inclusion and diversity for marginalized groups, and (iii) adult conduct in youth sport settings and coach development. While the evidence base meeting our criteria is nascent and heterogeneous, precluding quantitative synthesis, findings suggest that deliberate, multi-level culture change efforts can produce positive shifts in attitudes, behaviors and club practices, particularly when initiatives combine individual learning with organizational-level change and sustained external support.DiscussionCulture change in community sport settings is complex, uneven and often gradual, influenced by entrenched traditions and resourcing constraints. Future efforts should prioritize longitudinal evaluation designs, clearer conceptual and operational definitions of culture change, and theoretically grounded frameworks that can be compared across contexts.

In September 2025, the Brisbane Lions won an improbable second consecutive Grand Final of the Australian Football League—the Australian equivalent of a National Football League (NFL) Superbowl Championship or the English Football Association (FA) Cup. With a relatively inexperienced team and haunted by almost two decades of mediocrity, the sporting press and public immediately began searching for the secret to their success. For the Lions, the reasons for their victory were neither a surprise nor a secret. In the immediate aftermath of the game, co-captain Harris Andrews stated: “We've set up a culture where guys can thrive.” The “culture” of a sporting organization is often cited as being key to building a successful sporting organization at both the elite and grassroots or recreational levels of competition. Despite the apparent centrality of this factor, definitions of what constitutes positive “culture” in sporting organizations remain elusive. Sporting organization culture is currently undertheorized and often understood only within the context of a specific body, club, or organization. This narrative review closes the theoretical gap and aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing approaches to developing positive cultures within sporting organizations in Australian and internationally. To do so, we review six prominent models of organizational culture drawn from the broader literature in management and organizational studies. For each model, we examine whether and how it has been applied to sport organizations. We conclude by proposing an integrative framework that synthesizes insights from across these models to offer a new conceptual lens for understanding organizational culture in sport that can be adapted and applied to diverse settings.

Abstract The potential for athletes to experience dangerous behavioral changes following brain trauma is a topic of significant contemporary concern, particularly considering recent cases of brain-damaged athletes committing acts of criminal violence. Historical examples are far less known. This article examines the earliest known recorded case of sporting brain trauma being used to account for a crime. Raymond Henry Bousquet (aka Del Fontaine) murdered his girlfriend Hilda Meek on July 10, 1935, in London, England. At trial, he claimed he was legally insane at the time due to brain trauma from boxing. This case study examines documents gathered by law enforcement, prosecutors, and Bousquet's defense team, which reveal the contours of brain injury knowledge in England during the 1930s. It further examines the evidence from a feminist perspective, to question how the hypermasculine culture of boxing may have contributed to this crime.

Metrics, and increasingly altmetrics, are a pervasive aspect of academic life. A proliferation of digital tools available have seen greater emphasis on the quantification of the ‘performance’ of individual journals. Although metrics and altmetrics are justified in terms of increased accountability and transparency, there are significant inequities in the ways they are deployed. Key among these is the unsuitability of many popular metrics for assessing publications in the humanities and social sciences, as the data, algorithms and systems which support them cater to authorship and citation practices of the various science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. These issues are amplified for journals in the sociology of sport, which publish research by humanities and social science scholars whose work is quantified according to the standards of the health science departments in which they frequently work. In this discussion, we critically examine how common forms of metrics and altmetrics, including those produced by Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Altmetric.com, are applied to available sociology of sport journals. We analyse and critique how different metric algorithms produce variable measures of performance for each of the journals in the field and reveal how other information available on these databases can augment our understanding of the sociology of sport publishing ecology. Far from advocating the value of metrics and altmetrics, our analysis is intended to arm scholars and journals with the information required to critically navigate the entanglement of metrics and altmetrics with neoliberalism, audit culture and digital technologies in universities.

IntroductionThe golden section or golden ratio (61.8% or 0.618) is a mathematical phenomenon that appears in art, literature, music and nature with such ubiquity that it is thought to be a fundamental principle of aesthetic organisation. The golden ratio also manifests in sport, particularly as the proportion of wins to losses required to win a Major League Baseball championship. This study extends early work on the golden ratio in baseball by incorporating more than three decades of additional data.MethodsThis study involved a historically contextualized examination of how winning percentages have changed across the seven historical eras of modern baseball, including analyses of the relative contribution of offensive and defensive statistics to championship winning teams. Data was extracted from Baseball Reference and included statistics for 398 championship winning teams from both the American and National Leagues between 1901 and 2019. Pearson correlation coefficients were computed for winning percentage with indicators of offensive and defensive performance during each era. Main and interaction effects of Era and League on winning percentage were examined using factorial ANOVA, with follow-up analyses examining whether the golden ratio was included in each factor's 95% confidence interval.ResultsOur findings suggest that winning percentages for championship teams were closest to the golden ratio during eras where the relative contribution of offense and defense was most closely balanced: the Integration Era (1942–1960) and the Expansion Era (1961–1976).DiscussionPrevious scholarship theorizes that the golden ratio represents an aesthetic ideal or a Gestalt archetype. If this aesthetic theory is applied to sporting competition, these results suggest that baseball may be most aesthetically appealing to fans when offense and defense is balanced in such a way as to ensure that championship teams win 61.8% of their games.

Australian cultural attitudes toward sports related concussion (SRC) are understudied. Australia has a long history of valorising combat, collision, and contact sports, in which SRC is a common occurrence. It is therefore vital to understand how sociocultural and historical factors shape Australian attitudes toward SRC, in order to more critically evaluate the decisions made by athletes, parents, coaches, and others with regards to risk and brain injury in sport. This paper analyzed historical representations of SRC in Australian sporting newspapers between 1803 and 1954. Using distant reading, this analysis revealed four distinct periods of increased press discourse about "concussion, " which were subject to interrogation via close reading. Close reading revealed that concussion was being reported in the Australian sporting press as early as 1859. Further analysis revealed critical and scientifically informed discussions about the delayed effects of concussion in 1901, systemic critiques of sporting organizations' response to concussion in 1906, and evidence of a limited concussion crisis in Australian boxing during the early 1930s. The findings of this research show that concussion was not only being reported in Australian newspapers throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but it was subject to critical and informed commentary that has striking similarities with current debates about SRC. Despite this, widespread systematic changes to Australian sport did not occur until recently. This raises important questions about the political and institutional factors that prevented a major concussion crisis from developing in Australia during the early twentieth century, and prompts us to further consider the distinguishing features that facilitated the development of the current crisis.

Daniel Oakman’s biography proclaims cyclist and politician Sir Hubert Opperman ‘a household name, a legend – as popular as the cricketer Don Bradman and the racehorse Phar Lap’. Oakman’s assertion ...

Abstract:Muhammad Ali's name is one of the most significant yet understudied aspects of the great boxer's extraordinary life. Throughout his career, journalists used Ali's birth name (Cassius Clay) and his Islamic name (Muhammad Ali) to transmit their attitudes toward him. This study interrogates trends in newspaper usage of Ali's two names during the 1960s and 1970s as a way to understand changing public attitudes toward him during this period. It does so via a distant reading of 37,911 digitized newspaper articles obtained from ProQuest Historical Newspapers. By quantitatively visualizing trends and patterns in the usage of the two names, this study reveals that American journalists did not embrace Ali's chosen name until 1971. Acceptance of the name in the press was not gradual but was instead characterized by intense shifts at key points in Ali's career. Finally, this paper addresses the value of digital history—specifically, distant reading—for sport history scholars.

When Muhammad Ali died in June 2016, he was remembered by the media as a hero in the fight for racial equality. Tributes for the great boxer were meaningful in many respects, but they were also incomplete, sanitised and misleading. This paper aims to re-complicate our understanding of Ali's portrayals in the media by analysing newspaper discourse in the years immediately following his conversation to the Nation of Islam. Specifically, this investigation compares and contrasts the complex ways that black and white journalists used both his birth name (Cassius Clay) and his adopted name (Muhammad Ali) as a way of signalling their attitudes toward him. Close reading of newspaper articles published between March 1964 and September 1967 reveals that black journalists rejected Ali's adopted name and identity almost as comprehensively as their white colleagues. This aspect of Ali's legacy has been largely forgotten by the contemporary media, which calls us to consider the cultural construction of social memory, particularly when it revolves around sporting icons.

Muhammad Ali's refusal to be drafted into the United States Army in June 1967 led to a conviction for draft evasion, exile from boxing, and a complex response from the newspaper press. Although press reactions to Ali's draft resistance were overwhelmingly negative, his refusal to fight in Vietnam sowed the seeds for journalists to celebrate him as a hero upon his return to the ring four years later. Press reactions to Ali's two names (Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali) act as a lens for scrutinizing this attitudinal shift. This investigation involved macro and micro analyses of 12 United States newspapers. First, distant reading techniques were used to reveal distinct temporal patterns in the usage of both names. In September 1967, journalists from these publications began to use Ali's two names far more interchangeably than they previously had. By March 1971, they had fully embraced Ali's Muslim name over his birth name. Close reading then revealed how and why these patterns developed: changes to Ali's persona, as well as broader cultural and political forces, prompted newspaper journalists to accept his chosen name and identity in early 1971.

From "Pitifully Ignorant" to the "People's Champion":Shifting Perceptions of Muhammad Ali in the Louisville Defender, 1964–1971 Stephen Townsend (bio) Muhammad Ali lived away from Louisville for most of his life. Upon his death in June 2016, however, the famed boxer's body was repatriated for a series of extraordinary funeral celebrations. Louisville's black population became a focal point of the mourning. Under the hot Kentucky sun, thousands gathered on Grand Avenue in the West End to watch Ali's funeral procession pass his childhood home. Black Louisvillians mourned, but they also celebrated. They waved banners and shouted "Ali, Bomaye!" or "the champ is home!" Dr. Kevin Cosby explained that Ali was a "tremendous source of pride.… Because I'm from Louisville, and he looks like me."1 The way black Louisville memorialized Ali was moving, and the events spoke to important racial issues in the city's past and present. However, in terms of remembering Louisville's attitudes toward Ali during [End Page 611] his heyday, the city's posthumous veneration of the great boxer was also problematic. Ali was not always universally loved in Louisville. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, black Louisvillians interpreted Ali's racial and religious beliefs, and his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War, in complex, heterogeneous ways. Following his death, some of Louisville's leading black citizens expressed concern that "the city was celebrating a simpler version of its hero."2 Black Louisville's historical relationship with Ali was anything but simple—particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. The city's African American community was comprised of a diverse set of people and institutions, with varying opinions on Ali. This article will focus on one of those institutions: Louisville's black newspaper, the Louisville Defender. The Defender was owned, edited, and produced by a small group of middle-aged black men who advocated a specific set of values, including racial integration and notions of respectability associated with the southern black bourgeoisie. As a result, the Defender's editorial direction was often at odds with Ali's more radical approach to racial matters. As Ali's hometown newspaper, the Defender has often provided source material for histories of the famous Louisvillian. Despite this, there has been no attempt to analyze the Defender's reactions to Ali, or to place these reactions within the broader context of black-press journalism.3 Some authors have left snippets and hints, but unfortunately these are inconclusive and contradictory.4 Defender journalists who wrote about Ali in his prime were [End Page 612] Click for larger view View full resolution Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, posing for a photographer in 1963. Because of his conversion to Islam, the Louisville native was not initially presented as a hometown hero by the Louisville Defender. Photograph by Lin Caufield. University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections. [End Page 613] influenced by more than just hometown partisanship. Like their black-press contemporaries in other cities, they engaged critically with Ali and wrote articles that contributed to a complex and dynamic discourse about his racial, religious, and antiwar ideologies. The Defender's coverage of Ali changed dramatically during the 1960s and 1970s, undergoing distinct shifts in 1964, 1967, and 1970. When Cassius Clay announced his membership in the Nation of Islam in early 1964, the Defender's reaction was overwhelmingly negative. When he resisted the draft in mid-1967, the staff's displeasure with his religious affiliation remained, but this was tempered by their admiration of his stoicism before a seemingly malevolent white bureaucracy. By 1971, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor in his draft-evasion case, the Defender's coverage of him was generally positive. Like many other newspapers, the Defender's support for the war in Vietnam had waned and the paper celebrated Ali's stand as a hero for black equality. As sport historian Michael Oriard has noted, "at every stage of his career there was not a single Ali but many Alis in the public consciousness."5 Although local factors were important to the paper's representations of Ali, the discourse of the national black press ultimately mattered...