Social Capital and College Sport: In Search of the Bridging Potential of Intercollegiate Athletics

Abstract

Intercollegiate athletics in the United States have been linked with enhancing the sense of community between students on campus (Clopton, 2008). Still, little evidence confirms that maintaining a prominent athletics program contributes to the social capital of students on campus who follow those teams. Consisting of networks of relationships based on trust and norms of reciprocity, social capital is disaggregated into bonding (tightening connections between similar individu-als) or bridging (establishing new connections with other members of the campus community) varieties (Putnam, 2000). Results suggest that fan identity detracts from a student's overall social capital and showed no contribution to one's bridging social capital. This notion has potential ramification in higher education policy development as the connection between student affairs and athletics is increasingly encouraged (McKindra, 2008). Communities today are becoming increasingly complex with intricate net-works, challenged economies, and even a divided citizenry. In fact, in many parts of the world, the distance between socioeconomic levels is growing (Lardner & Smith, 2007). A similar notion of community was conceptualized by Putnam (2000) when he referred to the decline of social capital in the United States and the crumbling of community. Putnam described the impact of social networks upon the functioning of the overall society and the role of communities in fostering such networks, using the metaphor of bowling to illustrate the decline of social capital and community where more people bowl today than ever before. However, rather than bowling together in structured leagues where social networks could be created or nurtured, people today bowl separately with select friends on their own individual schedules. With this, Putnam pushed for the use of sports and recreation to play a role in the regeneration of social capital and its enhancement of crumbling communities in today's society. Sport has been linked to community development (Chalip, 2006) and community ownership and engagement (Jarvie, 2003), and recent research alluded to the potential of sport to enhance social capital of its participants (Skin-ner, Zakus, & Cowell, 2008). While select research in sport and social capital has looked at the connection with direct sport participation and social capital, even