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Life on the sidelines: the academic, social, and disciplinary impacts of male high school sports participation in California

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Life on the sidelines: the academic, social, and disciplinary impacts of male high school sports participation in California

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LIFE ON THE SIDELINES: THE ACADEMIC, SOCIAL, AND DISCIPLINARY IMPACTS
OF MALE HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS PARTICIPATION IN CALIFORNIA

by

Jeffrey O. Sacha

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

August 2016

Copyright 2016 Jeffrey O. Sacha
i

DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to Caitlin
My wife, best friend, and co-dreamer

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing this dissertation was a team effort and I had a dream team of teammates and
coaches behind me. I was only able to complete this project because of the training, pep talks,
and strategizing this team of people gave me. The thoughts and stories in this project represent
eight years of work that was made possible by a supportive group of people who cared about me
and my project a great deal.
First and foremost I am eternally grateful for the guidance of my two advisors, Veronica
Terriquez and Michael A. Messner. Together, Veronica and Mike shared invaluable theoretical
and methodological insight with me that helped shape this project. Veronica took me under her
wing as a research assistant on her CYAS project, which proved to be the incubator for many of
my dissertation’s research questions. That experience taught me how to answer big picture
questions one carefully measured step at a time. I admire and try to emulate the way Veronica
takes on practical, policy-relevant concerns that seek social justice. In addition to mentoring me
in the CYAS project, Veronica shaped the way I teach college students. Veronica’s Research
Methods course will always be the standard that I try to meet in my pedagogy.
I also am profoundly grateful for Mike’s help. I benefited from Mike’s tireless devotion
to developing his graduate students. I consistently received extensive, rigorous, and supportive
feedback from Mike throughout the many stages of my dissertation project. I’m especially
grateful to the dissertation writing group that Mike convened throughout my dissertation process.
Thank you Max Greenberg, Michela Musto, Chelsea Johnson, Kit Myers, Nathaniel Burke, and
Tal Peretz for your feedback on my work and for inspiring me to match your brilliance. Mike’s
guidance gave me the confidence to pursue a sports project for my dissertation. I would also like
to thank Tim Biblarz and Stan Huey for serving on my dissertation committee. Tim helped me
iii

think through my use of survey data and Stan provided a fresh perspective on places where my
concepts and theory were underdeveloped. I’m grateful for Tim’s and Stan’s generosity with
their time. Significant financial support for this project came from the John Randolph Haynes
Foundation. The 2014-2015 Haynes Lindley Dissertation Fellowship allowed me to dedicate an
entire academic year to analyzing my data and writing up my findings. Funding from the
University of Southern California’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences was also
integral to this project.
Along with my dissertation committee, I am grateful to several graduate student
colleagues who provided me not only with intellectual support and professional development,
but with a supportive community when challenges emerged. I feel fortunate to have been part of
USC sociology’s graduate department. I would especially like to thank Max Greenberg for his
friendship and support throughout graduate school. From day-one, Max was always happy to
have passionate conversations about everything from Foucualt to science fiction, to exchange
article drafts or to play a board game. I would also like to thank Brady Potts and Kushan
Dasgupta for their support and friendship. The backbone of our department was always its front
office staff. I would like to thank Stachelle Overland, Melissa Hernandez, Amber Thomas, Lisa
Losorelli, and Lisa Rayburn-Parks for all of the invisible work that they do. You all made me
feel like a friend, rather than a burden, even when I sent you emails at odd hours and desperately
needed your help.
I would also like to acknowledge my two mentors at Gonzaga University who inspired
me to step foot on the path that led to this dissertation. Vikas Gumbhir and Bill Hayes showed
me that sociology is a lifestyle and worldview, as much as it was a scientific way to make sense
of the world. I will always be the product of your mix of mentorship and friendship. Thank you
iv

for taking the time and emotional energy to build a space where undergraduate research can take
place.
My family was also central in helping me navigate graduate school and finish this
project. Graduate school was a bit of foreign concept to most of my family, but their support and
encouragement was constant. My mom, Margaret Sacha, never let me think twice about whether
I belonged in graduate school. She encouraged me to “stick with what got you there.” My dad,
Rick Sacha, made sure that I remembered that there was no replacement for rolling up my
sleeves and getting a job done. Finally, my Aunt Cathy and Uncle Vern found a way to make Los
Angeles feel a bit more like home by making annual trips to see me and by sending frequent,
heartfelt cards and notes to me.
Next, I’d like to recognize and thank my boxing family at the Pico-Union Boxing Club. I
founded the gym early in graduate school, as a free community boxing program for young folks
in the Pico-Union neighborhood, and was blessed to serve as the co-head trainer for the duration
of graduate school. The gym was my daily affirmation that sports are a social force that can
occasionally bring people together and make the world slightly better for under-served
communities. I was worried at the beginning of graduate school that the process would change
me somehow; that I would turn into an out-of-touch academic. The gym was my anchor in “the
real world” and I will never forget the friendships and memories that began there. Thank you
Ramon Espada for dreaming up and building the gym with me. Thank you Ricky Guerrero and
the Pico-Union Housing Corporation for partnering with us and for keeping the lights on! And
thank you to the hundreds of young people who showed up throughout the years to train, learn,
sweat, and share their lives with me.
v

Finally, I owe a very special “thank you” to my wife, confidant, and colleague Caitlin
Patler. Caitlin’s unflinching love and belief in me helped the moments of doubt dissipate. Her
occasional kick in the butt also helped me return to work when inspiration was running low or
the task at hand seemed too large. Every time my dissertation came up among friends or
colleagues, Caitlin proudly boasted about how great my project was. She believed in me and my
work during the times that I was ambivalent about both. Her love and care provided me the
strength to pursue and eventually finish this project. My love, respect, and appreciation for you
grow every day.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii
LIST OF TABLES vii
ABSTRACT viii
PREFACE x
CHAPTER 1 THE UNEVEN PLAYING FIELD: THEORIZING THE HIGH SCHOOL
SPORTS EXPERIENCE FOR YOUNG MEN ACROSS RACE, CLASS,
AND SCHOOL CONTEXT 1
CHAPTER 2 MORE THAN JUST A JOCK: THE BENEFITS AND LIMITS OF HIGH
SCHOOL SPORTS PARTICIPATION FOR YOUNG MEN IN
CALIFORNIA 45
CHAPTER 3 MILES AWAY, WORLDS APART: HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS
PROGRAMS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS 68
CHAPTER 4 ATHLETIC ECOLOGY: HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS AND THE
ACADEMIC, SOCIAL, AND DISCIPLINARY EXPERIENCES OF
YOUNG MEN 98
CHAPTER 5 COMING IN FROM THE SIDELINES: HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS AS A
SOURCE OF SCHOOL ENGAGEMENT FOR MARGINALIZED
YOUNG MEN 148
Bibliography 155
APPENDICES 166
APPENDIX A SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR PACIFIC COAST AND PARK
HEIGHTS RESPONDENTS 166
APPENDIX B SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR COLLEGE PREP RESPONDENTS
169
APPENDIX C FOLLOW-UP INTERVIEW PROTOCOL WITH CURRENT MALE
STUDENT-ATHLETES 172

vii

LIST OF TABLES
Table 1.1 Descriptive Statistics of High School Student Body 34

Table 1.2 Description of Interview Respondents by 37
High School, Race, and Sport Type

Table 2.1 Unweighted descriptive statistics of male respondents in CYAS sample 62

Table 2.2 Multinomial Logistic Regression of Male Extracurricular Activity 63
Participation by Race, School Type, and Family Income

Table 2.3 Parameter estimates for models of young men's high school academic 64
achievement

Table 2.4 Estimates from logistic regression models of young men's likelihood of 65
high school suspension or expulsion

Table 2.5 Estimates from logistic regression models of young men's likelihood of 66
high school graduation

Table 2.6 Estimates from logistic regression models of young men's likelihood of 67
enrolling in 4-year college/university

Table 4.1 Descriptive Statistics of Academic Performance by 111
School and Six Most Popular Sports

Table 4.2 Descriptive Statistics of Risky Social Behavior by 127
School and Six Most Popular Sports

Table 4.3 Descriptive Statistics of Punitive Discipline Experiences by 138
School and Six Most Popular Sports

viii

ABSTRACT
In this dissertation, I explore how school context, race, gender, and family socioeconomic
status combine to shape young men’s experiences with high school sports. I show that male
student-athletes enact student-athlete identities based on how they perceive and experience
opportunities in their school’s academic curriculum, social life, and disciplinary structures. Past
research finds that student-athletes generally perform better than non-athlete peers (Coleman
1961; Eitzen 1975; Marsh 1992; Mcneal 1995; Eccles and Barber 1999; Mahoney and Cairns
1997). However, sport sociologists have shown that sports do not uniformly benefit men across
race and class (Edwards 1969; Sabo and Runfola 1980; Messner 1992; Grasmuck 2005; May
2009; Hartmann 2012). It is unclear how, and under what circumstances, high school sports help
or hinder the high school careers of different groups of young men. Following the approach of
qualitative educational research, which shows that school structures contribute to educational
inequality (Ferguson 2000; Lopez 2002; Carter 2005; Morris 2012; Bettie 2014), I treat high
school sports as a part of a school’s larger inequality regime (Acker 2006).
My analysis begins be using statewide survey data from the 2011 California Young Adult
Study (CYAS) to test the predictors of and outcomes associated with high school sports
participation for young men. Analysis reveals that, controlling for other predictive variables,
young men who attended private high schools are far more likely to have played sports and
participated in non-sports extracurricular activities. Further, young adult men who participated in
both sports and non-sports extracurricular activities have favorable educational outcomes. To
illuminate the relationship between school context and male high school sports participation, I
use data drawn from male student-athletes at three Los Angeles high schools: College Prep High
is a majority-White private school, Pacific Coast High is a majority-Latino public school in an
ix

affluent neighborhood, and Park Heights High is a majority-Black school in a working-class
neighborhood.
Race, gender, and family socioeconomic status combined in unique ways to influence
how student-athletes came to attend each high school. The three schools represent disparate
levels of educational quality that students can access, based on family socioeconomic status and
neighborhood of residence. Within these unequal educational contexts, young men enacted
student-athlete identities based on their ability to access opportunity structures at their school.
Analysis of survey and interview data reveals five ideal types of student-athlete identity: the
scholar-athlete, the Division-1 (D-1) athlete, the rowdy jock, the benchwarmer, and the school
captain. White and Asian/Pacific Islander (API) respondents generally felt much less invested in
sports and played sports as a hobby or a way to bolster their college resumes. Thus, they were
more likely to adopt the “scholar-athlete” and “benchwarmer” identities. Comparatively, Black
and Latino respondents – especially those from low-income families – used sports as a way to
connect to school or to distinguish themselves from male classmates whom they described as
lazy and detrimental to the school. These groups of student-athletes were more likely to adopt the
“D-1 athlete” or “school captain” identities. Young men who are unable to access resources,
institutional support, and educational opportunity in their high school used sports to craft a
dignified self and to plan for social mobility after high school.
My findings call for a deeper understanding of how school contexts shape the educational
outcomes associated with extracurricular participation. My data show that young men’s
extracurricular participation is uniquely mediated by race, class, and gender, as well as school
context. The broader opportunity structures of high school resemble what Acker terms
“inequality regimes” and a high school’s sports program is part of this regime. Respondents’
x

perceptions of opportunities and challenges, both across and within schools, shaped student-
athlete identity and the high school sports experience for young men.

xi

PREFACE
I used to be jealous of Aaron Afflalo
I used to be jealous of Aaron Afflalo
He was the one to follow
He was the only leader, foreseeing brighter tomorrows
He would live in the gym
We was living in sorrow
Total envy of him
He made his dream become a reality
Actually making it possible to swim
His way up out of Compton with further more to accomplish
Graduate with honors, a sponsor of basketball scholars
It's 2004 and I'm watching him score thirty
Remember vividly how them victory points had hurt me
'Cause every basket was a reaction or a reminder
That we was just moving backwards
The bungalow where you find us
The art of us ditching classes heading nowhere fast
Stick my head inside the study hall, he focused on math
Determination, ambition, plus dedication and wisdom
Qualities he was given was the shit we didn't have
Dug inside of his book bag when Coach Palmer asked for his finals
He had his back like a spinal, meanwhile
We singing the same old song spinning the vinyl
Eleventh-graders gone wrong
He focused on the NBA we focused on some Patron
Now watch that black boy fly.

Kendrick Lamar
“Black Boy Fly”
good kid, m.A.A.D city (2013)

When I close my eyes and think of my childhood, it smells like the Kingdome. My family
and I sat in Seattle’s former sports stadium and watched the Seahawks and Mariners stumble
through the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It may be the strength of the olfactory sense, the romantic
lens of nostalgia, or simply the Kingdome’s poor ventilation, but some of my clearest and most
cherished childhood memories are saturated with the smell of that sports stadium. Hot dogs and
beer. Fireworks after a homerun. My grandpa’s old Seahawks jacket. Sports fandom and
xii

participation were never an option or a choice for me. I was raised in a family where sports were
constantly on the television during dinner or being discussed on family car rides. Did you see
Griffey’s homerun in the fourth inning? What were they thinking throwing the ball on third-and-
short?! It’s OK, we’ll be better next year (the Seattle sports fan’s mantra at the time).
My family’s sports fandom carried over into my own sports participation. I was an
average athlete in the most passionate sense. I was not tall and far from fast, but was hopelessly
in love with competition and teamwork: the social side of sports. Looking back on my
unremarkable athletic career, statistics and records pale in comparison to memories of
teammates, coaches, community, and the connection I developed with my mother. Sports were
one of the early foundations of my relationship with my mom.
In high school, I felt the stakes of sports grow. The crowds and my teammates became a
lot bigger, the coaches were a lot more serious, the Seattle Times printed names and pictures of
my classmates after games, and I had friends who had legitimate plans to play their sport at the
college level. I was fortunate to attend an all-boys Catholic high school in downtown Seattle that
was one of the few private schools in the area that wasn’t also nearly all-White. My high school
was still very White (slightly more than 50%), but its location and commitment to financial aid
allowed for students of color and young men from low-income families to attend the school at
higher rates than other Catholic schools in the area. We were also an athletic powerhouse. The
gym rafters were cluttered with maroon and gold banners that touted league, district, and state
titles in a variety of sports. Football, basketball, and track and field titles appeared in the rafters
more often than others. Beginning the first day of practice in any sport, your marching orders
were made explicitly and implicitly clear: hang more banners, be remembered as winners.
xiii

As I moved through my four years of high school, I observed older teammates go through
college recruiting, accept D-1 scholarships, and go on to play in college. As an average athlete, I
never gave a second thought to playing sports after high school. My parents’ union jobs gave me
the resources to plan for college without an athletic scholarship. My mind was my ticket to the
good life. From this social location, I watched my more talented, less privileged classmates
prepare for life after high school. Just like our parents on Friday night, I was their spirited
cheerleader and hoped that they would land a scholarship and earn a college degree. However, I
saw more than a handful of them fail to earn the necessary grades or SAT scores to qualify for
the D-1 scholarship that their athletic ability more than qualified them for. Some of them
suffered injuries that forced them to stop playing their sport. Others simply got burned out in the
transition to college and thus vacated their scholarship. These young men, my friends and former
teammates, inspired this dissertation.
Looking back, 12 years removed from high school, I now realize that only one of my
classmates went on to earn a living through sports. The path on which high school sports placed
many of my teammates and friends on ended well short of a job or college degree. Why were so
few of my friends able to parlay their high school sports success into meaningful post-high
school success? Was it a coincidence that many of our school’s stars were Black and from low-
income families? Did this happen at other high schools? These questions were well beyond me
as a high school student, but still burned in my mind as I entered college and graduate school.
Answering these questions requires a deeper understanding about how young men, across race
and family income background, dream and ultimately make life decisions during and after high
school. It also requires careful attention to how race and gender control resource distribution and
access to power in institutions like high schools. School-level resources shape the identities and
xiv

life chances of young men. That is the story of this dissertation. This is the story of the male
student-athlete, in his many forms, as he works to succeed in high school and beyond.
1

CHAPTER 1
THE UNEVEN PLAYING FIELD: THEORIZING THE HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS
EXPERIENCE FOR YOUNG MEN ACROSS RACE, CLASS, AND SCHOOL CONTEXT
Interscholastic sports emerged in the United States during the final decades of the 19
th

century. East Coast prep schools were the first places to host inter-school competitions. In fact,
interscholastic sport was one of the first high school extracurricular activities in the United States
(Pruter 2013). By the turn of century, leagues were formed to organize baseball, football, and
track and field contests between schools. Educators, parents, and policymakers drove the growth
of high school sports. These groups believed that sports could shape the bodies, minds, and
morality of young men (Cavallo 1981; Bundgaard 2005). Many of these beliefs persist among
contemporary proponents of youth sport (Frey and Eitzen 1991; Eitzen and Sage 2008; Coakley
2015). However, high school sports were not universally embraced. Early critics voiced concerns
about gender inequality, the over-investment of school resources, fairness in competition,
potential detraction from curricular focus, and the physical safety of student-athletes. After
nearly 120 years, the big question remains: do high school sports benefit young men?
This dissertation does not attempt to cleanly resolve this century-long debate. Rather, I
proceed from the assumption that high school sports participation can both benefit and burden
young men, under specific social circumstances. Thus, this study uses high school sports as a
window through which to study how young men form identities and worldviews within unequal
educational contexts. The following chapters use survey and interview data to explore how
young men cultivate student-athlete identities and come to see the academic, social, and punitive
disciplinary aspects of their high school. Survey data come from a statewide representative
sample of young adults in California, as well as current male student-athletes at three Los
2

Angeles high schools. After surveying all male student-athletes at three high schools – College
Prep, Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights High – conducted follow-up interviews with 20
student-athletes from each high school. These three high schools were selected for their unique
racial and socioeconomic demographics, as well as their comparable sizes and geographic
proximity to one another.
Past research shows that sport reflects broader social inequalities associated with race,
class, and gender (Edwards 1969; Gruneau 1983; Frey and Eitzen 1991; Messner 1992; Coakley
2015). Despite popular myths of meritocracy in sports, social inequality shapes a group’s ability
to play, prosper, and profit from sports. Gruneau (1983) writes, “Sport is a form of
institutionalized social practice that simply mirrors the social conditions which surround it” (p.
35). Sports are not immune to the deleterious influence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and class
inequality. However, sport participants possess agency and the ability to challenge this
structurally imposed inequality (James 1993; Edwards 1969; Hartmann 2003; Carrington 2013;
Musto 2013). The young men in my study exercise agency, as they adopt and perform student-
athlete identities within school contexts of both educational privilege and inequality.
School practices and policies explicitly and implicitly convey messages to young men
about what the “good student” does, thinks, and looks like (Carter 2005; Bettie 2014). Codified
school rules, teacher expectations, and discursive frameworks shape how teachers,
administrators, and security guards interact with students. A school’s definition of desirable
studenthood, and the resources they give students to perform this identity, also shapes how
students interact with one another, form social groups, and come to think about themselves.
While it is important – even necessary – for schools to define and cultivate “good students,” the
definitions that schools create and communicate often marginalize low-income students of color
3

by privileging students who enact a White, middle-class version of studenthood (Valenzuela
1999; Warikoo and Carter 2009). Young people, whose student performances fall outside of the
good student category, suffer marginalization and stigma in school and recoup a sense of dignity
in school through other means, or to simply disengage from the schooling process altogether.
The resources and opportunity structures dedicated to good student performance and academic
achievement are often disproportionately available to affluent White students, which puts Black
and Latino students from low-income families at a disadvantage. Extracurricular activities are a
potential compensatory source for marginalized students to find attachment to school and form a
“learner identity” (Nasir 2011).
Despite extensive research on inequality in schools and inequality in sports, high school
sports has received little more than peripheral analysis in both literatures. Thus, the relationship
between school-specific structures and male student-athlete identity is underexplored. Some of
the men in my sample experience what Sennett and Cobb (1972) refer to as “class injuries,”
where they are systematically unable to adopt a “good student performance” due to insufficient
opportunity structures in their high school. In the absence of resources and opportunity
structures, which facilitate a traditional good student performance, young men adopt and perform
student-athlete identities based on the available resources at their high schools (Chapter Four
describes some of the most prominent types of student-athlete identities). For some of the male
student-athletes I spoke with, their sports participation resembles Julie Bettie’s concept of
“badges of dignity” (Bettie 2014). These young men used sports participation to prove to school
adults, peers, their parents, and themselves that they were “about something” and “going
somewhere.” This dissertation shows how high school sport is a meaningful part of the high
school experience for some young men, and that the meaning making process for each student-
4

athlete is influenced by their experiences with and perceptions of the other institutional structures
of their high school. I refer to the relationship between high school sports and other institutional
structures – i.e. the academic curriculum, social hierarchy, and punitive disciplinary system – as
a school’s athletic ecology.
Borrowing from Bronfenbrenner’s concept of “the ecology of human development,” I use
the term “athletic ecology” to foreground the role that sports play in the opportunity structure
and culture of high schools. Athletic ecology resembles what might colloquially be called a
school’s “sports culture” or “athletic culture.” However, athletic ecology is fundamentally based
on the ways that non-sports school structures and processes shape what sports mean to
participants and how a school’s sports program then shapes these other school structures. Past
research has often subordinated sports to other school structures and processes that are seen as
more formative or impactful of student life chances and social mobility (Ferguson 2000). As
future chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, young men feel that sports play a critical role in
their high school lives and post-high school plans. A young man’s student-athlete identity is
based on his school’s unique athletic ecology and his own social location within that school;
sports participation has a unique social exchange rate for young men depending on both
individual positionality and how sports relate to other aspects of their high school. Specifically, I
explore how male student-athletes’ experiences interact with the academic curriculum, social
status systems, and punitive disciplinary structures of their high school. These overlapping
institutional structures operate differently in each school and combine to make high school sports
matter in unique ways and to various extents for respondents. My findings echo past research
that finds that race, class, and gender shape school structures and processes (Ferguson 2000;
Lopez 2002; Carter 2005; Bettie 2014).
5

I thus merge these bodies of literature by 1) centering the meaning making processes of
male student-athletes, 2) exploring the diversity of male student-athlete identities, and 3)
showing how and under what conditions sports matter for young men. From the outset, my
dissertation took the thoughts, worldviews, and sports experiences of male student-athletes
seriously. In doing so, I was able to avoid sweeping the high school sports experience aside as
trivial or frivolous, as past research on educational inequality too often has done (Ferguson
2000).
I use survey and interview data from both former and current male student-athletes in
California to explore the outcomes and experiences associated with high school sports for young
men. Previous studies of high school sports have devoted little attention to the relationship
between school-level factors and student-athlete worldviews and meaning making processes.
With few exceptions
1
, past researchers have stopped their observations of student-athletes at
their educational outcomes and actions without taking seriously the different ways that student-
athlete worldviews and meaning making process might differ across school context (Feldman
and Matjasko 2005; Messner and Musto 2015). Survey data, which constitutes the bulk of data
on student-athlete research, is ill-suited for describing the complex ways that male student-
athletes think about themselves, their school, and their sports participation. The construction of a
good student identity is daily work that students undertake at both conscious and subconscious
levels. Victor Rios (2011) sees the activity and worldviews of young men as part of a daily
"hustle" to stay out of the criminal justice system, resist punitive social control, and maintain a

1
See Messner’s (1992) research on former athletes who retroactively describe how sports impacted their high school
experience. See also Morris (2012; chapter five) for his analysis of football players at two high schools and how
their participation relates to their gender performance.
6

sense of dignity in the face of these oppressive forces. Rios’s approach emphasizes the agency
and creativity of young men and challenges simple depictions of them as victims or as
pathological deviants who act without intent or thought. I use a similar approach by interviewing
current male-student athletes. My interviews explored how these young men thought about their
school and used their student-athlete identity to do well in their schoolwork, gain popularity
among their peers, and avoid getting in trouble with teachers.
Black and Latino young men experience oppressive forces and limited access to
opportunity in their high schools (Ferguson 2000; Lopez 2002; Carter 2005; Morris 2012).
Future chapters of this dissertation show that sport participation can be a creative, conscious
strategy for young men as they navigate contexts of inequality. This finding challenges popular
notions that young men play sports because of some natural, gender-based proclivity or as a
naïve attempt at professional stardom (Hoberman 1997; Harrison, Harrison, and Moore 2002;
Azzarito and Harrison 2008). I challenge these simplistic and problematic renderings of student-
athletes – particularly student-athletes of color – by showing the motivations and meaning
making processes of student-athletes. Thus, this dissertation emphasizes the relationship between
young men’s worldviews, sports participation, and their educational experiences. Following the
tradition of cultural sociology
2
, Young (2006) defines “worldviews” as systems of thoughts and
beliefs that constitute future behavior. My data show that young men’s views of opportunity in
their high school shape their enactment of a student-athlete identity.
Despite the power of school processes to shape student life chances and opportunity
structures, marginalized male students are creative agents who perceive, critique, and strategize

2
Young (2006) cites Clifford Geertz (1973) as one of the foundational theorists of culture and worldviews.
7

within their particular high schools. The choice to play sports, and the particular type of athletic
performance that young men undertake, is an example of this agency. The stories in this
dissertation show that the decision to play high school sports and the role that sports come to
play for young men is hugely informed by how they internalize school-specific definitions of
“mainstream” and “marginalized” students.
The following sections discuss the relationship between high school sports and
educational attainment using both popular and academic sources. I start with a summary of the
pro/anti-sport debate and point out the theoretical and political blind spots of such a debate.
Next, I review recent ethnographic research on school inequalities to show how race, class, and
gender shape school structures and processes that often marginalize low-income young men of
color. After reviewing the literature, I present my project’s research questions and describe the
methods through which I contribute to past research. Finally, this chapter concludes with a
summary of all subsequent chapters.

The Opening Coin Toss: Do High School Sports Help or Harm Young Men?
A cover story for the October 2013 issue of The Atlantic, written by educational
journalist and author Amanda Ripley, is titled, “The Case Against High-School Sports.” In her
article, Ripley establishes two facts: 1) the public education system in the United States lags
behind that of other countries in several regards, and 2) high schools and high school students in
the United States invest heavily in sports provision and participation. Ripley uses these two facts
to conclude that high schools are invested in sports participation at the expense of academic
training and that if schools were to scale back its sports emphasis that the academic training of
students would improve. Her argument is that overly high material and cultural investment in
8

sports distracts and detracts from the academic mission of U.S. high schools. Ripley’s article
flies in the face of mainstream American sports culture, which views high school sports as a
sacrosanct part of American – particularly American male – adolescence (Coakley 2015).
The idea that sports involvement can come at the expense of academic investment and
long-term social mobility, while unpopular in sports circles, is not new among academic
researchers. Sociologist Harry Edwards was an early outspoken opponent of Black student and
Black community investment in sports as a path to social mobility. A former college athlete
himself, Edwards argued that sport in America, “…looms like a fog-shrouded minefield for the
overwhelming majority of Black athletes. It has been a treadmill to oblivion rather than the
escalator to wealth and glory it was believed to be” (Edwards 1984, p. 14). Edwards’s argument
centers on the futility of individuals and families investing too much time and emotion into
sports, while Riley’s article emphasizes the limits of financial or infrastructural school- and
district-level investment into sports. Riley and Edwards both base their arguments on the
assumption that sports are unable, on a broad scale, to improve the life chances of people from
marginalized communities – namely Black students from low-income families.
However, educational and sports sociology research from the past 30 years shows that
high school sports involvement can benefit certain high school and post-high school outcomes
for young people. Research on extracurricular activities finds that participation benefits the
academic performance, social engagement, and psychological wellbeing of participants
(Mahoney, Cairns, and Farmer 2003; Fredricks and Eccles 2006; McNeal 1995; Eccles and
Templeton 2002; Feldman and Matjasko 2005). This research has led educators, policy makers,
and increasingly philanthropic organizations to turn to extracurricular activity participation as a
way to address persistent racial and gendered gaps in academic achievement (Eccles and
9

Templeton 2002; Feldman and Matjasko 2005; Kahne et al. 2001). As of 2009, the US
Department of Education was spending over $1 billion annually on after-school programming
via its 21
st
Century Community Learning Centers (Gardner, Roth, and Brooks-Gunn 2009). As
one of the most popular and widely participated in forms of extracurricular activity, the findings
of this research potentially challenge anti-sport arguments.
The following sections summarize two distinct bodies of academic literature on young
male high school sports participation: developmental education research and sociology of sport
research. Taken together, this research shows mixed evidence about the impacts of high school
sports on young men’s academic performance and deviant social behavior (Hartmann and
Massoglia 2007; Miller et al. 2007). Indeed, the pro/anti-sport debate is an overly simplistic
rendering of the role that sports play in the lives of young people. I will show that viewing sports
as beneficial or detrimental largely depends on the theoretical framework used by researchers.
Education researchers often employ theoretical frames that focus on student development, which
emphasizes the academic benefits of sports participation as compared to non-participation.
However, sociologists of race, gender, and sport move beyond individual-level developmental
impacts and focus on how sport is structured in ways that replicate inequality. This literature
only rarely examines interscholastic sport’s impact on education inequality, however.

High School Sport as Developmental Context
The bulk of what we know about the impacts of high school sports participation comes
from educational researchers who study extracurricular participation broadly. Since its inception,
the field of extracurricular studies has generally found that students benefit from participation in
school-based clubs and activities. Extracurricular participation was first studied by sociologists
10

in the 1960s, but the vast majority of recent scholarship has come from psychologists (Feldman
Farb and Matjasko 2012). This disciplinary shift is evident in the contemporary methodological
and theoretical approaches used to study school-based activity participation. Terms such as
“prosocial behavior,” “risk factors,” “resilience,” and “externalizing behavior” are often used to
explain adolescent development in extracurricular contexts; the individual participant, rather than
the context of participation, is typically the unit of analysis. Methodologically, the vast majority
of research on extracurricular activities over the past 15 years has been quantitative (Fredricks et
al. 2002; Bohnert, Fredricks, and Randall 2010; Feldman Farb and Matjasko 2012)
3
.
The presumed academic benefits of high school sports participation are well documented
for young men. Male student-athletes from low-income families graduate from high school and
enroll in postsecondary education at higher rates than non-athlete peers (Eccles and Barber 1999;
Darling 2005; Gould and Weiss 1987; Marsh and Kleitman 2003; Mcneal 1995; Ream and
Rumberger 2008; Fox et al. 2010; Marsh and Kleitman 2003). Sports benefit young men from
more privileged backgrounds, as well. In fact, White men from middle-income families appear to
benefit the most from high school sports participation, as compared to females and males from
different racial and class backgrounds (Sabo, Melnick, and Vanfossen 1993). Even after
controlling for the effects of important predictive factors like family income, parental education,
and previous academic performance, there is still a positive relationship between playing school-
based sports and doing well in school for young men (Marsh and Kleitman 2003).

3
For examples of qualitative research in the field, see (Milbrey W. McLaughlin 2000; Milbrey Wallin McLaughlin,
Irby, and Langman 1994).
11

The abundance of quantitative research on extracurricular activity participation has
produced somewhat consistent findings on the outcomes of and predictors for participation.
However, the process through which participation comes to impact students is less consistent
across studies. Several studies of extracurricular involvement uses variations of social capital
theory to explain the apparent benefit of extracurricular participation (Broh 2002; Coleman 1987;
Eitle and Eitle 2002; McNeal 1999; Ream and Rumberger 2008). The quantity and the quality of
a student’s social networks increases through participation in school-based groups and activities.
Larger social networks improve a student’s access to information and make them more likely to
conform to the rules and expectations of the school setting (Portes 1998). The acquisition of
social capital is not uniform for extracurricular participants, however; both personal and
structural features impact how young people acquire and utilize social capital (White and Gager
2007). Kao and Rutherford (2007) find that immigrant and racial/ethnic minority students
receive different returns on their social capital than White peers. For example, Black students
had higher levels of social capital (defined by parental school involvement and intergenerational
closure) than Whites, but benefit less from this resource. The academic quality of a student’s
high school and his or her relationships with school-based adults also mediates social capital
access (Bohnert et al. 2009; Feldman Farb and Matjasko 2012; Lopez 2002; McNeal 1999;
Portes 1998; Stearns and Glennie 2010). Given the different ways that social capital accrues for
young people, I originally hypothesized that school-specific processes and relationships
associated with sports participation would challenge past theories of sports as developmental
contexts.
While they support the quantitative findings, social capital theories struggle to account
for the qualitative experiences of historically marginalized groups. Social capital theories can
12

implicitly construct the actions and attitudes of non-dominant groups as pathological (or
“cultural”) because they do not enable mainstream social mobility (Akom 2006). By making
social mobility promotion a defining outcome of extracurricular involvement, other important
experiences and processes may slip through the conceptual cracks. For some students, high
school success and post–high school social mobility is not hindered by a lack of social capital but
the presence of structural disadvantages associated with poverty and racially discriminatory
systems within schools (Akom 2006). Thus, the school-based racialization that low-income
students of color experience may preclude them from acquiring and exchanging social capital
through high school sports in the same way that their middle-class White peers do.
In addition to vague explanatory frameworks, educational research on extracurricular
participation also tends to lump high school sports in with other forms of school participation.
This approach leaves underexplored the sports-specific process and experiences that shape
student outcomes. Sociologists of sport have found that sport is fundamentally and uniquely a
racialized and gendered social institution (Sabo and Runfola 1980; Messner 1989, 1992;
Carrington 2010, 2013). The next section reviews past research that centers the relationship
between interscholastic sports and race.

The Mixed Outcomes of High School Sport Participation
Despite a huge number of participants each year, high school sports receive fairly little
attention from sports researchers. According to a recent review of the field of sports studies, high
school sports were the focus of only 3.4% of articles between 2003 and 2013 (Messner and
Musto 2014). The handful of sports researchers who study high school sports paint a much less
optimistic picture of male student-athletes, than educational research on extracurricular
13

participation. Miller and her colleagues have documented the complicated impact that sports
participation has on young men (Miller et al. 2003; Miller, Farrell, et al. 2005; Miller, Melnick,
et al. 2005; Miller et al. 2006; Miller et al. 2007). While male student-athletes evince better
grades than non-athletes, there seems to be a tipping point where over-investment in a “jock”
identity leads young men to risky or reckless behavior such as binge drinking, risky sexual
activity, and fighting. This trend is most pronounced among White male student-athletes (Miller
et al. 2007). Other sports scholars have found that sports a be a meaningful source of identity and
comradery for young men, but that it can also encourage a “win-at-all-costs” mentality whereby
men use their bodies as weapons on the field, use performance enhancing drugs, or break rules in
order to succeed (Sabo 1992; Messner 1992; Kreager 2007).
Debates over the benefits and drawbacks of interscholastic sports participation often
focus on the outcomes of playing sports, namely academic performance, graduation rates,
college enrollment, and student behavior. Thus, the experiences, thoughts, and hopes of student-
athletes are rarely considered. In his book, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete,
sport Hartmann (2003) criticizes this simplistic good/bad theorizing among sport scholars:
They [previous theories about the role of sport in society] have thus failed to grasp the
complex ways in which sport (not to mention popular culture more generally) is bound up
with the constitution, reproduction, transformation, and, in some cases, contestation of racial
order in societies organized according to liberal democratic principles. (p. 25)

Hartmann interprets contemporary anti-sport arguments as a reaction to the uncritical,
mainstream pro-sport logic of the early 20
th
century, what he calls the “sport-as-positive-social-
force discourse” (p. 24). By focusing on the outcomes of sports participation, popular and
academic debates about the role of school sports overlook the qualitative nuances of the student-
athlete experience. Outcomes-focused studies of high school sports do not reveal much about the
14

relationship between school-level processes and student-athlete identity. To help make sense of
the role that sports play in the high school lives of young men, the next section reviews literature
from school ethnographers and sociologists of sport. Educational ethnographers find that school
structures play a critical role in perpetuating educational achievement gaps. This body of
research shows how race, class, and gender shape young people’s academic, social, and
disciplinary experiences at school.

Putting Sport in Its Place
Theories of hegemonic masculinity, racial formation, and student identity formation
inform my dissertation’s theoretical framework and data collection. I use these theories to make
sense of how male student-athletes form their worldviews, aspirations, and identities in contexts
of both educational privilege and inequality. The young men in my sample play sports at three
very different high schools. Race and gender combine in unique ways for each school’s
definition of the “good student” and how male student-athletes relate to this definition.
Gramsci’s (1971) concept of “hegemony” is central to both hegemonic masculinity and racial
formation theories. Broadly speaking, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony argues that power is
maintained through both force and consent; a small, but powerful elite maintain their privileged
social position through control over structural/institutional arrangements and ideology.
Hegemony is not an overt, tangible force. Rather, it is an invisible social arrangement that seems
like commonsense to the vast majority of society. Historically, White middle-class men have
controlled material resources, formal political processes, and definitions of “proper”
comportment in the United States. The social practices of racism, classism, patriarchy, and
heteronormativity buttress this group’s social position. However, Gramsci’s theory also accounts
15

for the ability of groups and individuals to contest unequal social orders. This aspect of
hegemony is central for hegemonic masculinity and racial formation theories, respectively.
Racial orders and gender orders coalesce over time and place via struggle and negotiation
between powerful and marginalized groups of people. These social orders shape the educational
experiences and outcomes of young people. A school’s disciplinary policies/practices, curricular
tracking, and resource allocation maintain social hierarchies among students based on race,
social class background, and gender (Ferguson 2000; Oakes 2005; Carter 2005; Morris 2012;
Bettie 2014). These school-level processes ultimately create and enforce boundaries between two
groups of young people: mainstream students and marginalized students. Mainstream students’
attitudes and actions reflect the norms and values of their high school. These students enjoy
privileged access to academic, social, and extracurricular resources that facilitate a smooth
transition to young adulthood. Conversely, students who resist these norms and values, or who
are unable to perform a school-sanctioned version of studenthood, are marginalized students.
These students are more likely to be from low-income families, to be Black and Latino, and are
increasingly more likely to be young men (Lopez 2002; Ferguson 2000; Morris 2012). It is
unclear, however, how high school sports participation relates to mainstream school values and
norms. How do male student-athletes feel that their participation relates to their high school’s
definition of a good student? What does sports participation mean for young men across school
contexts that have different definitions of student success? Is sports participation a subversion or
validation of this definition?
Cultural sociologists show that marginalized students are not passive, structurally
determined victims. They act creatively in the face of educational inequality. While they have
little control over the quality of their school, school disciplinary policies, or the job prospects
16

that await them upon graduation, high school students exert control over their social world via
the identities and worldviews they adopt (Willis 1984; Carter 2005; Bettie 2014). A student’s
identity and worldviews shape their transition from high school to young adulthood. In his
interview study of 26 low-income Black men in Chicago, Young (2006) shows that the
worldviews and belief systems of marginalized groups shape how they plan for social mobility.
Faced with structural obstacles to job security and social mobility, the men in Young’s study
either developed critical analyses of race and class, or blamed themselves for what they saw as
personal failures. Very few studies have used a comparative approach to study how students,
across social class and race, form worldviews and plan for their educational future.
The young men in my study enact student-athlete identities within school contexts
marked by both inequality and privilege. For many of the Black and Latino young men in my
study, school resembles what Acker (2006) refers to as an “inequality regime.” Acker argues
that, "All organizations have inequality regimes, defined as loosely interrelated practices,
processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities
within particular organizations" (p. 443). Her research focuses on inequality in work
organizations and she concludes that unequal opportunity at work is perpetuated by economic
forces that limit large-scale social mobility for employees. The schools my sample are admittedly
different than the work organizations that Acker studies. Public schools and public school
administrators play a more passive role in shaping who enters their school, as compared to the
bosses in charge of Acker’s work organizations. Even without intentional resource hoarding by
school officials, neighborhood racial and socioeconomic segregation in Los Angeles contribute
to the clustering of low-income Black and Latino students into the same school (Orfield and Lee
2005).
17

In schools, students often have very little ability to change the quality of their school or to
improve their job prospects upon graduation. However, young people deploy “badges of ability”
(Sennett and Cobb 1972; p. 62 - 66) or “badges of dignity” (Bettie 2014; p. 167) at school to
navigate and sometimes resist processes that they feel are unjust. Yet, in spite of the rich,
descriptive detail in school ethnographies, high school sports receives only passing attention by
this body of research. To supplement the findings and frameworks of school ethnographers, I
also review the work of sports sociologists who show how sports related to the social categories
of race and masculinity. Sports sociologists provide useful language and theoretical frameworks
to help make sense of high school sports. However, even sociologists of sport have also been
neglectful of the high school student-athlete experience (Messner and Musto 2014). Thus, I put
educational research in conversation with sport sociology to outline how my dissertation
theorizes the male high school sports experience. My goal is move beyond the simple pro-
sport/anti-sport debate by showing how hegemonic masculinity and contemporary racial orders
shape the identities, worldviews, and educational aspirations of male student-athletes.

Conformity and Resistance: Race, Gender and the “Good Student”
Educational ethnographers have shown that school processes and institutional structures
shape student educational outcomes, worldviews, and identities; school practices and policies are
racialized, gendered, and classed, which contribute to educational inequality and academic
achievement gaps (Willis 1981; Eckert 1989; Ferguson 2000; Carter 2005; Bettie 2014). School
ethnographers theorize these inequalities with the frameworks and concepts of racial formation
(Staiger 2004), hegemonic masculinity (Morris 2012), and “injuries” associated with race, class,
and gender (Bettie 2014). Despite a wide range of empirical focuses and theoretical approaches,
18

school ethnographers often find two general groups of students in their field sites: mainstream
students and marginalized students. These two diametrically opposed groups of students have
been described using different names, depending on the researcher’s regional context and
theoretical framework: ear ’oles and lads (Willis 1981), Jocks and Burnouts (Eckert 1989),
schoolboys and troublemakers (Ferguson 2000), Preps and cholas/smokers (Bettie 2014),
noncompliant believers and cultural mainstreamers (Carter 2005). These social groups are
defined by how they relate to school values and rules.
Mainstream students reflect a school’s values, follow its rules, and strive to meet the
expectations of school-based adults. Eckert (1989) describes mainstream school culture as a
“corporate orientation” that stresses hierarchy among students and conformity to the rules and
expectations of school adults. For Eckert, members of the social category she terms “the Jocks”
reflect the corporate orientation of the school. Bettie (2014) observes a similar group in her
study, which she refers to as “the Preps.” Both the Preps and the Jocks were more likely to be
White, to have college-educated parents, to enroll in honors courses, and to participate in
extracurricular activities. In other words, the students who live more privileged lives outside of
school also enjoy more privileged lives inside school, and are thus more likely to be
“mainstream” students. Carter (Carter 2005) finds that race and culture also factor into the
construction of the mainstream student category. Rather than students self-generating social
groups, Carter argues that the “hierarchy of cultural meanings” in schools create social groups of
students based on their engagement and attachment to school. Attachment refers to student
feelings of belongingness and embeddedness at school, while engagement describes student
behavior. The “cultural mainstreamers” in Carter’s book appear to “buy in” to the dominant
19

cultural practices of their school and express faith in traditional paths to success, such as working
hard in school and showing respect to teachers.
The bulk of school ethnographies from the past 20 years, especially work done in
majority-Black and majority-Latino schools, has spoken to and pushed back against the theory of
oppositional culture. Introduced by anthropologist John Ogbu in the late 1970s, oppositional
culture theory posits that low-income students of color perform poorly in schools because of a
refusal to conform to school standards that they view as “White” and incongruent with their self-
concepts (Ogbu 1978). This theory is popular among conservative audiences who believe that all
students have the same opportunity to succeed. Oppositional culture theory downplays the role
that structural forces play in shaping the educational experiences and worldviews of low-income
students of color. Several recent studies have challenged oppositional culture by shifting the
focus away from student behavior and focusing on student feelings and values. Harris (2011)
uses multiple data sets to demonstrate convincingly that Black students are very invested in
educational achievement, and that Black students who excel in school do not face ridicule from
their peers.
Similarly, in her ethnographic study of a majority-Latino high school in Texas,
Valenzuela (1999) finds that students are by-and-large invested in their academic success, yet
hold very pointed critiques of the schooling process. Valenzuela introduces the concept of
subtractive schooling to describe the way that schools strip non-White students of important
cultural and social resources that they bring from their families and communities. Subtractive
schooling makes non-White students feel unwelcomed at school, which leads to their
disengagement from coursework and relationships with school-based adults.
20

In place of oppositional culture, scholars have begun to use “injuries” related to race,
gender, and class background as a way to describe the educational motivations and school
behaviors of low-income young men of color. This term is adapted from Sennett and Cobb’s
1972 work, which focused on the ways that working-class men cope with feelings of shame and
failure due to their precarious economic status. The term “injuries” centers the external,
structural forces that shape the feelings and actions of marginalized youth. Thus, this term is
more applicable to my project than “oppositional culture,” which has been criticized as victim
blaming. The evidence is clear that schools treat students differently based on their race, gender,
and family income background. Thus, a major task for qualitative researchers is to show how
specific school-based structures create injuries for some students, and how students react to these
injuries. Sports participation may represent a student’s response to these injuries. High school
sport potentially provides a space for marginalized students to form identities and social
networks that offset stigma related to race, class, and gender.
As discussed previously, low-income Black and Latino young men are often found on the
undesirable end of most educational inequalities. Compared to White and API students, they earn
the worst grades, take the fewest honors courses, graduate from high school and enroll in college
at the lowest rates, and are suspended/expelled at the highest rates (Conchas 2001; Noguera
2009; Harris 2011; Quinn 2015). These young men do not choose to fail. They are born into
social positions and attend high schools that make it extremely difficult to succeed by White,
middle-class standards. In the face of these structural inequalities, Black and Latino young men
navigate schools in creative ways at school. Research has not fully elaborated the role that
school-based sports play in this process.
21

Historically, sports play an important role in the maintenance of the broader gender order
(Messner 1992). Sex segregation and a focus on bodily practices allow sports to remain a
“bastion of masculinity.” Connell (1987) uses the term “hegemonic masculinity” to describe the
pattern of gender practices by which White, middle-class forms of masculinity remain at the top
of the gender order. Hegemonic masculinity is at once vulnerable to challenges and able to adapt
to new economic, political, and social circumstances that might undermine male dominance
(Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). In the face of challenges to traditional definitions of
masculinity and femininity, social practices like sports maintain the dominance of certain groups
of men over women and other men. Kimmel (2005) and Messner (1992) respectively argue that
the dominance of White, middle-class men was threatened by economic modernization and the
emerging Women’s Movement at the end of the 19
th
century. Sports thus became a way for men
to manage this “crisis of masculinity” by creating segregated clubs and spaces. It is no
coincidence that school-based sports emerged during this time among elite all-male prep schools.
Another challenge to traditional masculinity and male dominance came with the 1972 passage of
Title IX, which opened the door for unprecedented levels of female participation in sports.
Despite the increasing number of women playing sports, male sports continue to receive the vast
majority of coverage of mainstream cultural attention (Cooky, Messner, and Musto 2015). The
disproportionate coverage of contemporary men’s sports situates the male body and stronger,
faster, and superior to the female body.
Despite the power that hegemonic masculinity exerts over how young men think about
and act within the world, relatively few men can enact hegemonic masculinity (Connell and
Messerschmidt 2005). Working class and poor men, men of color, and queer-identified men face
unique obstacles to performing and receiving the rewards of hegemonic masculine performance
22

(Connell 1995). These groups of men enact alternative forms of masculinity
4
. Marginalized
groups of men compensate for their inability to perform hegemonic masculinity (Sennett and
Cobb 1972; Schrock and Schwalbe 2009). Ferguson (2000) observes young Black male students
perform aspects of hegemonic masculinity in three ways: male heterosexual power, classroom
disruptions, and practices of “fighting” or being willing to fight (p. 171). These three behaviors
simultaneously attempt to claim a form of gendered power, and mark these young men as targets
for surveillance and discipline at school. Indeed, “doing gender” in this way often cuts both ways
for marginalized males students; the solution becomes the problem when hegemonic masculine
performance reinforces racial/class-based tropes in the eyes of school authorities. Morris (2012)
finds that low-income Black and White young men at two high schools perform contrived
carelessness as a way to subvert school expectations and earn status in the eyes of their peers.
The young men at Morris’s two schools strove to be “known” for something – and thus to avoid
the social stigma of being “a lame” – via sports participation, fighting, and gang affiliation. Both
of the schools in Morris’s study had a noticeable absence of “positive” ways for young men to
establish their identities and reputations. In contexts of limit opportunity, they followed limited
and limiting “gender scripts” that emphasized a tough-guy, anti-school persona to the detriment
of their academic success and post-high school social mobility.
Lopez (2002) also documents the educational costs of certain racialized masculine
performances in schools. Lopez connects this in-school performance to young men’s experiences
in public spaces and the family. She argues that the female Caribbean immigrant students in her

4
Connell (1995) describes three main alternative forms of masculinity that marginalized groups of men enact:
subordinated masculinity, complicit masculinity, and marginalized masculinity. Each of these enactments are
unique, based upon a man’s social location.
23

sample were able to access social capital in these spaces that their male counterparts could not,
which led to young women being more institutionally engaged at school and successful in their
transition to young adulthood. In the absence of school-based resources and pathways to success,
low-income Black and Latino men deploy combinations of “cool pose” or “tough front” versions
masculinity (Majors and Billson 1993; Dance 2002). These performances serve as short-term
“badges of dignity” for young men, but ultimately hinder their educational success and post-high
school social mobility.
In their review of contemporary research on men and masculinity, Schrock and Schwalbe
(2009) develop the idea of “manhood acts” as a way to refocus the field on the ways that
masculine behaviors and performances reify the gender order (p. 281). Schrock and Schwalbe
define manhood acts as behaviors and interactions that claim privilege, elicit deference, or resist
exploitation. The authors briefly discuss sports participation as a type of manhood act. Some
aspects of men’s sports (i.e. use of physical violence, denial of pain or injury, intimidating
opponents, and a “win at all costs” mentality) clearly fit Schrock and Schwalbe’s definition of a
manhood act. However, this concept fails to capture some important differences in the student-
athlete identities of young men.
The work of school ethnographers makes clear the ways that race, class, and gender
combine to create and enforce hierarchies within schools. However, this research has largely
ignored the student-athlete experience. The majority of the authors discussed above only
dedicate a few sentences to recognizing the apparent significance of high school sports in the
lives of young men (see Morris (2012), p. 115–18 for an exception). For example, Lopez (2002)
finds that, “One unifying thread in the narratives of men was their fixation on sports. The
makeshift basketball courts that lined the streets of the Caribbean homes visited attested to the
24

fact that sports have become the metaphor for masculinity and freedom” (p. 134-135). Despite
this powerful observation, no analysis of the young men’s sports experience is undertaken. High
school sport seems to be subordinated to outcomes and processes deemed to be more “serious”
or impactful for student life chances. Ferguson (2000) reports that several of her young male
respondents report serious investment in sports, but she does not seem to take this seriously.
Toward the end of her book, Ferguson writes:
When I asked the kids, Schoolboys and Troublemakers, how they thought schooling might be
improved, they looked at me blankly…The responses that I wrung out of them seemed
trivial, even frivolous. It was all about play, about recreation; a longer recess, bigger play
areas, playgrounds with grass not asphalt – and so on. (p. 234, emphasis added)

If respondents take sports seriously, researchers need to take sport seriously. Researchers cannot
responsibly imbue significance to respondent descriptions of their academic, social, and
disciplinary experiences, then selectively downplay their meaning making experiences within
sports. Academic researchers’ lack of engagement with this popular, potentially influential
aspect of high school student life creates some unanswered questions that my project seeks to
answer. Low-income young men of color are consistently found on the wrong side of educational
inequality gaps, despite relatively high participation rates in high school sports. Thus, I take
sports seriously and explore sports as a potential space for intervention into school-based
processes that currently push young men to the margins or completely out of the schooling
process. The next section reviews past work by sports sociologists who find that sports are an
important context where young men form racialized, classed, and gendered identities.
Data in this dissertation reveal vast differences in the identities and worldviews of male
student-athletes, across race, sports team, and school context. These nuances in student-athlete
identity are informed by hegemonic masculinity at the local level (Connell and Messerschmidt
25

2005). School-specific opportunity structures interact with sports programs to create unique
environments where young men adopt and enact student-athlete identities. Respondents with
limited access to educational resources and opportunities were more likely to invest strongly in
an “athlete” identity. Where academic success is expected and enabled, male student-athletes
balance their commitment to sports with a commitment to succeed in the classroom. Future
chapters of this dissertation discuss the implications for this kind if identity investment. I argue
that schools make more or less available certain kinds of student-athlete identities. A young
man’s student-athlete identity shapes how he views and experiences the academic, social, and
punitive disciplinary aspects of high school. Regardless of school quality or personal
background, the vast majority of male student-athletes in my project felt that a desirable
masculinity included sports proficiency. For these young men, building mental toughness,
physical strength, and winning were all highly desirable traits.

Race, Gender, and Student-Athlete Identity Formation
Regardless of their pro-sport/anti-sport leanings, sport scholars agree that sports are a
decidedly racialized and gendered social space. Sport more often than not privileges masculinity
and the male body at the expense of people and lifestyles deemed “un-masculine” (Messner
1992, 2002; Sabo and Runfola 1980). In his foundational work on masculinity and sports,
Messner (1992) argues that sports are “a social institution constructed by men, largely as a
response to a crisis of gender relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (p.
16). The school success barriers facing Black and Latino young men create a contemporary
“crisis” of both gender and race. For these young men, high school sport potentially acts as a
source of individual empowerment, social status, and increased attachment to school. Along with
26

benefiting individual participants, sports participation has the potential to resist and reshape
racial categories and hierarchies in schools. Young men’s student-athlete performances can
reflect, challenge, or resist racial hierarchies and discursive frameworks. Sports sociologists have
documented the ways that sports shapes and in shaped by racial categories (Edwards 1969;
James 1993; Hartmann 2003; Carrington 2010).
Carrington (2010) elaborates Omi and Winant’s (1994) concept of “racial projects” in his
articulation of “sporting racial projects”:
Sports [is] a particular racial project…that has effects in changing racial discourse more
generally and that therefore reshapes wider social structures. Sports become productive, and
not merely receptive, of racial discourse and this discourse has material effect both within
sport and beyond. Sport helps to make race make sense and sport then works to reshape race.
(p. 66, emphasis in the original)
Carrington’s work focuses on the sporting racial projects undertaken by professional and
Olympic athletes. Carrington uses these extraordinary athletic case studies to demonstrate how
the idea and body of “the black athlete” (most often the Black male athletic body) challenged
white racism and shaped contemporary meanings around race and gender in sport. Like
Carrington (2010), Hartmann (2003) treats sport as a “conflicted and contested racial terrain” (p.
252). Through his examination of the 1968 Olympic protests, Hartmann (2003) argues that the
planned boycott by Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) and actions of sprinters Tommie
Smith and John Carlos challenged the racial status quo. The protests of the 1968 Olympics
forced the amateur sport infrastructure to shift its practices and policies, thus creating a “new
racial equilibrium in sport” (p. 251). The protests of the ’68 games did not nullify racial
inequality and power imbalance in sports. However, the direct challenges that activists made to
the racial status quo forced sports institutions to change policies.
27

Carrington and Hartmann each show that highly visible athletes are uniquely positioned
to challenge racism and prejudice. However, Omi and Winant’s original concept of racial
formation also emphasizes the importance of mundane, everyday interpersonal interactions for
shaping race as a social category. The vast majority of high school athletes will not go on to play
professional sports or compete in the Olympics. Can amateur high school athletes challenge
racial common sense at their schools in the same way that Tommie Smith and John Carlos did at
the international level? Given Carrington’s examples of athletes who challenge anti-black
racism, it is tempting to conceptualize sporting racial projects as opportunities for athletes to
work against oppressive categories and assumptions. However, sporting racial projects can serve
the powerful, as well as the oppressed. For example, the NBA’s adoption of a mandatory player
dress code in 2005 disallowed players from wearing jewelry, hats, or t-shirts before and after
games (Leonard 2006; Hughes 2010; Lorenz and Murray 2014). This is an example of a sporting
racial project that serves to stigmatize expressions of Black “street culture” and constrain the
agency of athletes of color. Similar racial projects play out in amateur sports in the United States.
Andrews et al. (1997) connect the emergence of youth soccer in America with the rise of the
White, middle-class suburb. The authors argue that soccer played a central role in creating and
maintaining a White cultural boundary between U.S. suburbs and the presumably Black inner
city. Both progressive and conservative sporting racial projects played a significant role in racial
formation processes of the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries (Carrington 2010).
I argue in this dissertation that high school sport is a site for racial formation and gender
construction. As a specific kind of sporting racial project, high school sports can be both a source
of empowerment and a mechanism for social control in a given school setting. It remains unclear
whether sports participation challenges or reflects the discursive frameworks that produce gaps
28

in academic achievement and school discipline (i.e. the construction of Black and Latino men as
anti-intellectual threats to school norms). The remainder of this section reviews past research on
student-athlete identity. I conclude by discussing how I use this past research to explore student-
athlete identities at three different high schools in Los Angeles.
As discussed above, social groups in schools are created and given meaning via school
policies, as well as gendered and racialized ideologies among teachers and administrators (Willis
1981; Eckert 1989; Ferguson 2000). However, students also have a great deal of agency in
shaping these social groups. Students have the ability to self-select into social groups (often
multiple groups) at school and adopt the habits and identity of the group (Carter 2005; Bettie
2014). Student identification, whether chosen or imposed, can carry unique sets of rewards and
sanctions. To this point, we know relatively little about how young men come to identify as
student-athletes. In their study of a male college basketball team, Adler and Adler (1991)
document the “role conflict” between student identity and athlete identity (p.175). The external
pressures and demands placed on college student-athletes forces them to eventually self-select
into a limited and limiting sports-first identity. Despite a keen initial desire to do well in school,
these college student-athletes encountered structural and cultural barriers to succeeding in both
the classroom and on the court. The intense demands on their energy and time forced these
young adults to make “pragmatic adjustments” to their academic goals. This meant choosing less
challenging majors or taking a lighter course load to accommodate team activities. As their
college careers progressed, these young men experienced “role engulfment” in which they
withdrew from academic life and disproportionately invested in their athletics. College student-
athletes face very different demands than high school student-athletes.
29

Nasir (2011) finds that extracurricular spaces, including high school sports, do not
automatically benefit participants. Rather, these learning settings need to include “identity
resources” (p. 110) that facilitate learning in order for students to benefit. Nasir presents the story
of Gozi, a student-athlete who has a caustic relationship with his track coach. Gozi’s reputation
as a “lazy goof-off” limited the kinds of mentorship and membership he received on the track
team. Students who attend poorly resourced schools have a harder time forming “learner
identities” via sports. “Creating a self in the face of a paucity of identity resources in a setting is
difficult and perhaps near-impossible work” (Nasir 2011, p. 127). The presence of a caring and
respected coach is a crucial sports-based identity resource for young men. Drawing upon his own
pedagogical approach to coaching a high school women’s basketball team, Duncan-Andrade
(2010) argues that sports coaches are uniquely positioned to benefit the academic and social
outcomes of low-income youth of color. Duncan-Andrade believes that sports participation and
the empathetic coaches are an effective alternative to “deficit models” of helping marginalized
young people. Deficit models of intervention approach low-income Black and Latino youth as
problems in need of fixing. However, Duncan-Andrade argues that the right kind of coach can
connect youth to school by emphasizing their strengths/abilities and validating their passions.
May (2009) also emphasizes the importance of coaches as mediators of the benefits of sports.
May uses his seven years of coaching a high school men’s basketball team to argue that sports
can both benefit and impede young Black men. May finds that coaches, despite having the best
interests of their student-athletes in mind, can over-emphasize sports as a means for social
mobility. Similar to the college student-athletes in Adler and Adler’s study, this “dirty trick”
(May 2009, p. 6) leads some young men to prioritize sports at the expense of academics.
30

Thus, coaches and other sports-based resources shape the enactment of student-athlete
identity for young men. However, much of past literature uses single case studies to explore
processes and impacts of identity construction. This project’s sampling strategy allows me to
show how school-level resources shape student-athlete identity across school contexts. This
dissertation illuminates high school sports’ often central role in shaping how some young men
experience their schools, peers, and themselves in racialized and gendered ways. In making this
argument, I challenge the idea that sports are a meritocratic, color-blind activity that benefits all
participants. Sports are not removed from the deleterious effects of institutionalized racism that
scholars have found to shape other aspects school in the U.S. The school-level policies, practices,
and systems that students experience – namely the academic curriculum, social status system,
and punitive disciplinary processes – shape and are shaped by students’ individual and collective
sports participation. However, I do not fully side with critics of high school sports. My survey
and interview data show that young men in my sample find friendship and empowerment in
sports, and feel that sports bolsters their commitment to school success. Future chapters will
illuminate how school context shapes the sports experience for young men. A school’s sports
program is a part of a larger ecology of racial, gendered, and class based inequality. Thus,
depending on a school’s athletic ecology and a young man’s social location, sports can both a
problem and a solution. The role that high school sports come to play for young men is hugely
shaped by school-level structures, resources, and relationships.

Literature Review Summary
The previous sections have reviewed past research that shows that schools and sports,
respectively, reflect broader racial, gendered, and class-based inequality. Sports sociologists have
31

shown that sports can be both a force for social change and a site of social inequality for men of
color from low-income families (May 2009; Brooks 2009. White, middle-class men have the
greatest access to and tend to benefit the most from high school sports (Sabo et al. 1993).
Similarly, sociologists of education – in particular school ethnographers – argue that schools play
an active role in perpetuating educational achievement gaps (Valenzuela 1999). Black and Latino
young men, particularly those from low-income families, experience unique challenges in high
school (Lewis 2003). Despite the popularity of high school sports, and the large number of
young men that participate in it each year, very little qualitative research has explored the
relationship between school context and the male student-athlete experience (Messner and Musto
2014). Other aspects of high school have been studied, such as the formal curriculum (Lopez
2002; Morris 2012), disciplinary structures (Ferguson 2000; Nolan 2011) and social groups
(Carter 2005; Bettie 2014). However, high school sports programs have generally remained at
the periphery of qualitative research on educational inequality. By treating sports as an
influential school structure, this dissertation’s research questions seek to address this unsolved
puzzle.

Research Questions
This project illuminates the wide range of experiences that young men have in high
school sports, and how these experiences relate to non-athletic parts of their high school lives.
My project answers a series of questions in order to understand how sports participation fits into
the high school career of young men, across race, sport type, and school context. Answers to
these questions are crucial as academic researchers, educators, and policy makers seek to
promote school engagement and academic success among marginalized students. At a time of
32

persistent – even growing – racial gaps in educational outcomes, young men continue to
participate in high school sports at high levels. The remaining chapters of this dissertation
analyze survey and interview data to address the following sets of questions:
• How do race, social class, and gender shape the high school sports experience for young
men? To what extent do the identities, worldviews, and high school experiences of young
men differ, across race, social class, and school context?
• How is high school sports participation associated with young men’s academic, social
and disciplinary outcomes? How do these associations compare across school context and
student-athlete background? What are the processes through which these associations
manifest?

Studying Male Student-Athletes in California
I use survey and interview data, drawn from two sources: the California Young Adult
Study (CYAS) and interviews with current high school student-athletes at three Los Angeles
High Schools. The CYAS data help me show the academic and disciplinary impacts and
outcomes of high school sports participation for young men in California (N = 1,029). These data
also allow me to show how sports participation compares to other forms of extracurricular
involvement for young men. My 60 interviews with current student-athletes illustrates the
meaning making processes and school-specific experiences that contribute to these outcomes for
young men. These two sets of data combine to holistically show if, how, and for whom high
school sports matter.

33

The California Young Adult Study (CYAS)
The CYAS is a 2011-2012 statewide mixed-method study that examines the
postsecondary educational, employment, and civic engagement experiences of young adults in
California, ages 18-to-26. The first phase of data collection for the CYAS began in April of 2011
and consisted of a random-digit dial (RDD) telephone survey of a statewide representative
sample of 2,200 young adults who attended high school in California. Follow-up, in-person
interviews were then conducted with 220 phone survey respondents. For this dissertation, I
analyze CYAS survey data from male respondents (N = 1,029) to test the predictors and
outcomes of high school sports participation among young adult males.

Current Student-Athlete Interviews
The CYAS data allow me to examine how high school sports participation relates to
some important high school and post-high school outcomes for young men. I supplement these
data with interview data collected from current male student-athletes in Los Angeles. My 60
interviews with current male student-athletes help illuminate the school-level processes and
experiences through which the state-level, quantitative outcomes are achieved. Recruitment of
these respondents began by surveying male sports teams at three Los Angeles high schools
during the 2014-2015 school year: College Prep High, Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights
High. I selected these high schools based on their geographic proximity, comparable study body
sizes, and respective racial composition (see Table 1.1). These three schools were located within
11 miles of one another, played each other occasionally in sports, and were roughly the same
size. As I discuss in Chapter Three, the geographic proximity of these schools produced an
unanticipated finding. Respondents from each school knew students at the other two schools,
34

sometimes living on the same street as these students and playing on “travel teams” with them
during the offseason. This allowed me to explore the role that school reputation (both athletically
and academically) played in how young men imagined their high school experience.
Respondents at each school had unique expectations of their high school, based on its athletic
and academic reputation, and described different processes for “choosing” that high school based
on these reputations.

Table 1.1 Descriptive Statistics of High School Student Body

College Prep
High
Pacific Coast
High
Park Heights
High
Student Enrollment for 2013-2014
1
1,270 1,804 1,180
Race
1

White 51% 9% <1%
Black 10% 22% 52%
Latino/Hispanic 26% 58% 46%
Asian/Pacific Islander 12% 5% < 1%
Some other race 0% 6% < 1%
Graduation Rate by School Year
3

2012-2013 NA 79.6% 64.0%
2011-2012 NA 82.7% 66.4%
2010-2011 NA 74.8% 66.7%

% of Student Body Receiving Free
or Reduced Lunch
2

NA
*
74.4% 70.9%
Data Sources:
1
Los Angeles Unified School District Office of Data and Accountability, School Information
Branch;
2
California School FRPM Statistics from 2010-2011 School Year;
3
2013 California Longitudinal
Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS)

*College Prep High does not offer free or reduced lunch programs. However, 22% of the student body was
on some form of financial aid during the 2013-2014 school year

Despite their close geographic proximity, each high school had unique racial
demographics and school-level resources. College Prep High was a majority-White school
(51%), Pacific Coast High was majority-Latino (58%), and Park Heights High was majority-
35

Black (52%). My sampling approach allows me to demonstrate how a school’s racial
composition shapes the outcomes, meaning making processes, and identity formation of male
student-athletes. College Prep High is different in other important ways from Pacific Coach High
and Park Heights High. It is a private, all-boys high school and was selected in spite of these
differences because it was the only majority-White school within reasonable proximity to the
other two schools. Chapter Three discusses these three high schools in more detail.
I gained access to these schools after first getting the permission of each school’s Athletic
Director to contact the school’s in-season coaches to schedule times to speak to their respective
teams. This process involved sending several emails each week, leaving voicemails, and in some
cases showing up in person to speak to coaches after practice. After scheduling a day, time, and
place to speak to a team, I administered a short, 3-page survey to all team members (N = 534).
5

Surveys were always collected pursuant to team activities, either before or after practice at the
school’s sport facilities. These surveys were anonymous and took roughly 15 minutes to
complete. Along with basic demographic information, the survey consisted of three sections:
school engagement, punitive disciplinary experience, student-athlete identity
6
. At the completion

5
In order to avoid double-counting certain student-athletes in my sample, I asked young men to raise their hands if
they had taken the survey before. For example, several cross-country runners from the fall sports season also run
track during the spring. Because they had already indicated their dual-sport participation on their fall survey, I
omitted them from the spring survey collection.
6
My project’s measure of “degree of athlete identity” asks respondents to rate themselves on a scale of 1-to-10 with
1 representing “complete student identity” and 10 representing “complete athlete identity” (see Appendix section for
survey instrument). Previous research has argued that “jock identity” demarcates a specific type of sports experience
that denotes a high commitment to sports, at the expense of academic investment or achievement. The term “jock” is
a bit dated and is loaded with negative stereotypes connected to gender, race, and school under-performance. Thus, I
used the more neutral term of “student-athlete” to create a scale upon which respondents placed themselves. Rather
than asking respondents to identify with a potentially stigmatizing term such as “jock,” this question takes as a
starting point that these young men are both students and athletes, and then asks them to identify with one (or
neither) of this hybrid identity category. Follow-up interview data teases out the nuances around what criteria
respondents used in answering this question.
36

of the survey, any students interested in participating in a follow-up interview filled out a contact
form. Respondents were promised a $20 compensation for participating in the follow-up
interview.
The survey collection process provided me a small glimpse into the collective
personalities of each team and their coaching staffs. After returning home from collecting these
surveys, I wrote up short ethnographic notes on my interactions with the team and their coaches,
as well as descriptions of the school and its sports facilities. My familiarity with each school’s
physical environment and each coach’s personality also helped me craft questions for
respondents during our in-person, follow-up interviews.

Follow-up Interviews with Current Student-Athletes
Survey respondents who volunteered to participate in follow-up interviews were
contacted via email, text message, or phone call to schedule a time and place to be interviewed.
Interviews most often took place at a coffee shop or café close to the respondent’s home, as the
majority of my respondents did not own a car. All interviews were recorded, fully transcribed,
and coded for analysis.

37

Table 1.2 Description of Interview Respondents by High School, Race, and Sports Type
(N = 60)

College Prep
High
Pacific Coast
High
Park Heights
High
Race
White 10 2 0
Black 6 7 17
Latino/Hispanic 2 7 3
Asian/Pacific Islander 2 4 0
Main Sports Team
Baseball 3 4 4
Basketball 1 7 7
Cross-Country 5 3 0
Football 4 4 5
Soccer 2 2 NA
Track/Field 3 0 4
Volleyball 1 0 NA
Water Polo 1 NA NA
# of interview respondents 20 20 20

The interview protocol consisted of six sections: personal high school sports history, non-
sports activity participation, high school academics, social life, and school disciplinary
experiences. To begin the interview, I asked each respondent to describe how he came to play his
particular sport in high school. This included follow-up questions about how they perceive the
overall athletic reputation of their high school, their initial motivations, how these motivations
have changed, the roll that their parents played in their sports involvement, and how they’d
describe their team’s personality or chemistry. The second section of the interview protocol
focuses on the non-sports activities and clubs that respondents participate in. This section
supplements my quantitative analysis in Chapter Two, which compares the impacts of sports
participation to other forms of extracurricular involvement. For some respondents, sports were
38

one of several activities. At College Prep and Pacific Coast, respondents were often multiply
involved. However, respondents from Park Heights tended to only be involved in sports.
The final three sets of questions in my interview protocol focus on three institutional
structures of school that marginalize low-income Black and Latino men: the academic
curriculum, social hierarchy, and punitive school discipline. These sections begin by asking the
respondent to broadly describe each of these aspects of their high school. Next, I asked each
respondent to describe how they see themselves fitting into or relating to these structures. Each
section concludes by asking the respondent to describe if and how their status as a student-athlete
impacts their experiences with academics, social life, or punitive discipline at their high school.
During the academic curriculum and punitive discipline sections of the interview, respondents
often described teachers at their high school and explain how they feel their sports participation
shapes their relationship with teachers. It was often much easier for respondents to describe the
ways that other student-athletes related to academics, social life, and school discipline. Only a
handful of respondents felt clearly that they were either privileged or punished in these school
structures because of their student-athlete status. However, nearly all respondents were able to
generally describe and give examples of teammates or other student-athletes navigating
disciplinary structures, social status systems, and academics.

Organization of the Dissertation
Chapter 2 uses CYAS survey data to describe the predictors for and impacts associated
with high school sports participation for young men in California. I use regression analysis to test
the association between high school sports participation and academic performance, high school
suspension or expulsion, high school graduation, and 4-year postsecondary educational pursuit.
39

Young adult males who participated in both sports and non-sports school-based extracurriculars
earned better grades, graduated from high school, and pursued 4-year postsecondary education,
as compared to respondents who did not participate in any extracurricular activities. Surprisingly,
young men who only played sports in high school did not differ dramatically from young men
who did not participate in any kind of school-based extracurricular activities. Finally, no kind of
extracurricular participation predicted a young man’s likelihood of being suspended or expelled
during high school. The findings from this chapter suggest that high levels of school
engagement, rather than activity-specific processes, might be driving the benefits that past
research has attributed to extracurricular participation for young men. Data also suggest that
punitive discipline is a pervasive experience for young men.
This chapter outlines the broader stakes of high school sports for young men and
establishes the quantitative relationships that qualitative interview data will help to illuminate.
The chapters that follow use interviews with current male student-athletes to show how playing
sports relates to their high school enrollment process and shapes their experiences with
academics, punitive discipline, and social life at their high school. These chapters help to
illuminate why sport-only participants do not benefit in the same way that multiply involved
students do. Finally, interview data helps explain the lack of significant association between high
school sports and school discipline for young men.
Chapter Three introduces the three Los Angeles high schools from which I draw my
interview data: College Prep High, Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights High. These three
schools are unique in several important ways, including their racial demographics, student-body
SES, reputations for academic success, traditions of sports excellence, academic opportunity
structures, and disciplinary systems. The differences in racial demographics and resource levels
40

reflect the high levels of neighborhood segregation in Los Angeles. This chapter describes how
male student-athletes and their families make school choices and come to attend their particular
high school. The school selection process played out very differently for respondents depending
on what school they attend and what neighborhood they live in. For better and for worse, study
respondents and their families were highly aware of the high school they were entering.
Respondents from College Prep were afforded the luxury of school choice because their families
could afford to pay private school tuition and to invest in college preparation for their children at
very young ages. Respondents from Park Heights High, on the other hand, described feeling
forced to attend a school they heard was dangerous and under-achieving. Finally, based on their
school selection process, I describe two distinct groups of students at Pacific Coast High: the
locals and the bussers. The locals lived in the affluent neighborhood around the school, while the
bussers came from neighborhoods like the one around Park Heights High. Despite living far
away from the schools, the bussers at Pacific Coast High found ways to enroll in the school
7
. In
fact, a handful of Pacific Coast respondents were supposed to attend Park Heights. Like College
Prep respondents, the young men from Pacific Coast emphasized the school’s academic quality
and extracurricular opportunities outside of sports.
Each high school’s sports program had varying levels of influence over student-athletes’
school selection and anticipated high school experience. Young men from College Prep spoke
excitedly about the role that “tradition” and “pride” played in their decision to attend their high
school. High school sports played a minimal role in College Prep respondents’ school selection

7
As I discuss in Chapter Three, the bussers enrolled in Pacific Coast through three methods: approved intra-district
transfer, magnet program lottery, using a friend’s or family member’s address that lives near the school.
41

process, despite their descriptions of the school’s rich tradition of sports success and a highly
competitive sports culture at the school. Respondents at College Prep cited the school’s high
quality academic training, expanded college opportunities, and “learning how to be a man” as
reasons they chose to attend the high school. In spite of its poor academic reputation, Park
Heights boasts a rich history of athletic excellence and has produced several notable college
scholarship and professional athletes. Thus, young men at Park Heights describe sports as one of
the only benefits to attending the school; they were not excited about attending the school, but at
least they could participate in a successful sports program. I concluded that sports seemed to play
a very peripheral role in the school selection process for most Pacific Coast student-athletes. The
bussers went out of their way to attend the school because of the academic opportunities they
perceived the school to offer. However, a handful of these young men relied on their sports-
based social networks to gain acceptance into the school.
Chapter Three concludes by emphasizing the different starting points from which male
student-athletes begin their high school careers; they are not blank slates upon which high school
sport exerts its influence. Based on their anticipated high school experience, a male student-
athlete steps onto his campus with unique motivations for playing sports. These motivations, and
how they relate to other aspects of his high school experience, informs the degree to which he
invests in a student-athlete identity.
Chapter Four uses interview data from current student-athletes to explore how they
perceive three aspects of high school: academic opportunity structures, social life, and punitive
discipline systems. Borrowing from for Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) concept of “the ecology of
human development,” I introduce the term athletic ecology to describe how these multiple,
overlapping school structures interact with a school’s sports program. A school’s athletic
42

ecology shapes the availability and desirability of specific student-athlete identities for young
men. Thus, male student-athletes experience high school sports in unique ways and come to view
non-sports school structures very differently, across school context. I show how school systems
make more or less available five ideal identity types. It is possible for student-athletes at College
Prep, Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights high to enact any of these five unique student-athlete
identities. However, the ways that opportunity is structured at each school make these identities
unequally available and desirable to male student-athletes. Thus, these identities were more
prominent at certain schools in my sample.
The abundance of academic resources such as AP courses, high quality teachers, and
caring college councilors at College Prep combine to make the “scholar-athlete” identity widely
available to its student-athletes. Scholar-athletes participate passionately in both sports and
school, but they remain first and foremost students. Even when a college scholarship is available,
scholar-athletes prioritize their intellectual development because they feel that it is a safe, long-
term investment than sports.
Conversely, Park Heights student-athletes were highly critical of the lack of academic
opportunities at their school. They described poorly resourced classrooms, teachers who were
inadequate or frustrated by student misbehavior, and disruptive classmates that made it hard to
learn. Park Heights student-athletes who felt they couldn’t get to college via academics, invested
heavily in their sports participation and exacted a “D-1 athlete” identity. This student-athlete
identity was encouraged by Park Heights’s rich tradition of athletic success and notable alumni
who played in college and professionally. Another ideal identity type was the prominent among
Park Heights respondents was the “school captain.” These young men, particularly the baseball
and football players, used sports participation as way to distinguish themselves from non-athlete
43

classmates whom they saw as detrimental to the school environment. Rather than academic
excellence or athletic stardom, the school captain concerns himself with “acting right,” being a
good school citizen, and leader among his peers.
Pacific Coast High was a mix of privilege and limitation for student-athletes. Two
distinct student-athlete identities emerged within this context: “the rowdy jock” and “the
benchwarmer.” The rowdy jock identity was embodied by the Pacific Coast baseball team, which
was largely made up of young men from affluent families that lives close to the school. These
student-athletes were associated with heavy partying on the weekends and the team members
described each other as “brothers” or “like family.” They were a highly popular and exclusive
social group at the school. The absence of a rich athletic history at the school, and the availability
of non-athletic opportunities in the classroom and other extracurricular activities, led many
Pacific Coast respondents to enact a “benchwarmer” student-athlete identity. These young men
were lukewarm at best about their sports participation. Benchwarmers described themselves as
average or subpar athletes, and only played sports as a way to get out of physical education
classes or as an additional item on their college resume.
The diversity of student-athlete identities among my respondents calls into question the
validity of simple, one-dimensional measures of high school sports participation. Untangling the
complex ways that sports participation impacts young men requires accounting for the school-
level structures that imbue sports with meaning. Student-athletes enact unique identities within
school contexts marked by privilege, deficit, or both.
In Chapter 5, I will discuss how past theories of racial formation and hegemonic
masculinity argue individual-level, local acts can both challenge and reify unequal social orders
(Omi and Winant 1994; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The data presented in my dissertation
44

suggest that high school sports participation and individual student-athlete identity enactment
plays a role in both challenging and perpetuating racial and gender orders. College Prep High,
Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights High are school contexts marked by a mix of privilege and
deficit, educational resources and challenges. Within these school contexts, sports serve as
identity resources for young men (Nasir 2011). For White respondents from affluent families,
sports participation was a further extension of their privilege. These young men used sports to
supplement their academic experiences and to bolster their social status at school. However, high
school sports played a more compensatory role for marginalized young men. These young men
invested heavily in sports as a way to plan for their future and to mark themselves as good
students in the eyes of peers, coaches, and teachers. By contrast, some respondents had the
luxury of not really caring that much about sports. Not all young men play sports with passion.
For these young men, sports was a space to have some fun or hang out with friends. I will
conclude by suggesting that, while not a magic bullet solution, under certain circumstances it
holds the potential for collective challenges to educational inequality at the school level.

45

CHAPTER 2
MORE THAN JUST A JOCK: THE BENEFITS AND LIMITS OF HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS
PARTICIPATION FOR YOUNG MEN IN CALIFORNIA
One of my best friends in high school was every teacher’s dream. Tim was an all-state
distance runner, the student body president, leader of the debate team, star of the school play,
was always at the top of the honor role, and seemed to be everybody’s friend. He was our senior
class valedictorian and went on to a selective four-year college. Tim was Superman. Thinking
back on all the things that Tim did in high school, it is difficult to parse out if and how specific
activities may have contributed to his success. Many of my classmates excelled in multiple
aspects of high school, but few matched Tim’s achievement across such a wide range of clubs
and teams. Was he successful because of his extracurricular involvement or was he involved in
these activities because he was successful? Which one of Tim’s many activities made him
Superman? Tim was also from a White middle-class family who actively encouraged and
enabled his extracurricular participation and his older brother went on to an Ivy League school.
Growing up with a range of family and community resources, Tim likely would have done well
in school regardless of his extracurricular participation. However, it is unclear what role, if any,
extracurricular participation – and sports participation specifically – played in Tim’s school
success. This chapter examines patterns of extracurricular participation among young men in
California, and it demonstrates how sports and other types of extracurricular participation are
associated with educational outcomes.
This chapter draws on survey data from the 2011 California Young Adult Study (CYAS).
In addition to examining how race and socioeconomic status are related to high school sports and
other types of extracurricular involvement, my analyses examine the association between high
46

school sports participation and four educational outcomes: high school academic performance,
experiences with exclusionary high school discipline, high school graduation, and enrollment in
4-year post-secondary education (PSE). I attend to how sports participation, both alone and in
combination with other types of extracurricular participation, relates to these four educational
outcomes.
Because the remainder of this dissertation focuses on the school-level processes and
experiences of male student-athletes, my analyses in this chapter examine extracurricular
activities that take place in high schools, and exclude those that occur in the community. Past
research theorizes that extracurricular participation increases student attachment to school via
peers and school-based adults (Eccles and Barber 1999; Eccles and Templeton 2002; Fredricks,
Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004). This chapter shows that there are variations in outcomes associated
with school based activities. Indeed, sports participation by itself does not appear to be more
beneficial than non-sports forms of extracurricular activities. Complementing the quantitative
findings presented in this chapter, the next two chapters of this dissertation use interviews with
current male student-athletes in California to illuminate the processes, experiences, and student-
athlete identities that make high school sports participation matter – or not matter – for young
men.

Unequal Incentives and Opportunities for Participation
Before discussing how young men might benefit from sports and other types of school-
based extracurricular involvement, it is important to establish that social class, race, and gender
shape both the incentives and opportunities to participate in sports and other types of school-
based activities (Messner 1992; Hartmann 2003; Brooks 2009; May 2009; Stearns and Glennie
47

2010; Shakib et al. 2011). In general, low-income young men and Black and Latin o young men
lack equal access to extracurricular school activities (Stearns and Glennie 2010; Glennie and
Stearns 2012; Okamoto, Herda, and Hartzog 2013). Unequal access to quality extracurricular
activities is connected to the unique academic challenges that these young men encounter (Kao
and Thompson 2003). Young men from low-income families, including those who are Black and
Latino, are significantly more likely than their economically privileged peers to attend under-
resourced high schools where both curricular and extracurricular offerings are sub-standard
(Duncan and Murnane 2011; Sampson 2012; Lareau 2014). In this sense, these students face a
double disadvantage.
In response to these unequal educational opportunities, some marginalized young men
adopt an oppositional culture (Ogbu 1978; Willis 1981) or “cool pose” (Majors and Billson
1993) in school as a way to maintain dignity or social status among peers. As part of this “cool
pose,” some young men embellish traditionally masculine traits by acting tough, aggressive
toward female peers, disinterested in academic success, or confrontational with teachers and
school authorities. At the same time, high school sports potentially offer marginalized young
men a source of individual empowerment, social status, and increased attachment to school in a
way that neither violates cool pose performance (Anderson 1999), nor undermines school norms
and values (Morris 2012). In fact, some sports sociologists argue that economically or racially
marginalized young men compensate for their educational disadvantages by disproportionately
participating in sports (Edwards 1969; Hoberman 1997; Edwards 2000). This chapter explores
whether or not and to what extent young men experience socioeconomic and racial inequalities
in high school sports.

48

The Benefits of Sports Participation for Young Men
Prior research generally suggests that extracurricular participation is associated with
beneficial educational outcomes for students (Holland and Andre 1987; Mcneal 1995; Mahoney,
Cairns, and Farmer 2003; Fredricks and Eccles 2006). Students who participate in extracurricular
activities evince better grades, lower rates of school dropout, less externalizing behavior, and
stronger school engagement than non-participants (Marsh 1992; Marsh and Kleitman 2002;
Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004). However, some question the causal relationship between
participation and academic benefits; selection issues may be driving this relationship, whereby
more privileged students, along with those who are highly motivated and academically
successful, participate more often in activities than underperforming peers (Feldman and
Matjasko 2005; Coakley 2009). The analyses presented in this chapter account for the roles of
family socioeconomic status and race in mediating the association between extracurricular
involvement and educational outcomes. However, data limitations do not allow me to control for
other individual-level characteristic such as student motivation or academic performance prior to
participation, which might mediate the relationship between extracurricular involvement and
educational outcomes.
Nonetheless, this chapter uniquely examines the relationship between extracurricular
participation and experiences with punitive school discipline (namely suspension and expulsion).
Prior research indicates that male student-athletes are more likely to participate in some deviant
or risky behaviors such as underage drinking and fighting (Fejgin 1994; Eccles and Barber 1999;
Eccles et al. 2003; Miller et al. 2005; Hartmann and Massoglia 2007). However, it remains
unclear whether this risky behavior results in school-based punishment or discipline. This is an
important question to answer, given punitive discipline’s well documented negative impacts on
49

student academic performance and future social mobility (Arcia 2006; Reynolds et al. 2008;
Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010). It is also important to consider whether sports participation
alone can have positive impacts on young men’s educational or disciplinary outcomes.
Young men who participate in both sports and other types of extracurricular activities
may reap the most benefits from learning and personal development outside of the classroom
(Fredricks and Eccles 2006). Sports and non-sports activities might cultivate unique, but
complementary skills and social networks in participants. For example, sports may develop time
management, teamwork, and mental discipline (Marsh and Kleitman 2003; Lleras 2008), while
other types of activities develop civic skills and a sense of efficacy (Terriquez 2015). It is unclear
whether sports participation has the same impact on educational and disciplinary outcomes as
other types of extracurricular involvement. Further, it is possible that a tipping point may exist
for extracurricular participation whereby combining sports involvement with too many other
activities detract from schoolwork. The “over-scheduling hypothesis” posits that participation
can come at the expense of academic coursework or emotional health for students who invest too
much time in extracurricular activities (Luthar, Shoum, and Brown 2006; Feldman Farb and
Matjasko 2012). The best-case scenario might be when students achieve a balance between their
extracurricular, social, and academic lives.

Research Questions
Three key points from past research are especially germane to this chapter: 1) high school
sport is a classed, racialized, and gendered extracurricular activity, 2) extracurricular
participation generally benefits academic performance, but we know relatively little about its
impact on school discipline, and 3) it is yet unclear whether sports participation alone is
50

sufficiently associated with positive outcomes for young men. This chapter analyzes a
representative sample of young men in California to answer three questions regarding the
predictors of and outcomes associated with high school sports participation:
• To what extent is student race and family socioeconomic status (SES) associated with
school-based activity participation for young men in California?
• How does playing high school sports relate to high school academic performance,
educational attainment, and experiences with school discipline?
• How do the educational outcomes of young men who only play sports compare to those
of other young men who play sports and engage in other types of extracurricular
activities?

Data and Methodology
Data for this chapter come from the California Young Adult Study (CYAS). The CYAS
is a statewide mixed-method study that examines the post-secondary educational, employment,
and civic engagement experiences of young adults in California, ages 18-to-26. This chapter
draws on 2011 telephone survey data collected through random-digit dialing of landline and cell-
phones in the state. The total survey sample consists of 2,200 young adults who attended all or
part of their K-12 schooling in California.
8
This chapter relies on data gathered from male CYAS

8
The telephone survey was conducted with the help of the California State University Fullerton’s Survey Research
Center, which used Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) software to record respondent answers. This
software helped callers quickly navigate the survey instrument by using predetermined skip patterns, so that
respondents with particular experiences (i.e. high school dropouts, recipients of public assistance, participants
reporting mentoring relationship) received particular questions that applied to their experiences. Telephone
interviews lasted an average of 25 minutes. Respondents to the telephone survey were generated from a list that
included both landline and cell phone numbers. Landlines were oversampled from U.S. Census tracts, which were at
or below the 20
th
percentile for median household income. The landlines were dialed using a two-stage cluster
51

respondents (N=1,029). Future versions of this chapter may incorporate sampling weights so that
the results are representative of the study population.

Measures and Analysis
I begin by providing descriptive statistics for my sample. I report the racial/ethnic,
socioeconomic, and age composition of male survey respondents. I then describe young men’s
extracurricular participation, dividing the sample into four groups. I base these groups on
responses to survey questions regarding involvement in five types of high school extracurricular
activities: sports, arts/music, student government, debate, or community service/activism. Based
on their answers to these questions, I sort respondents into one of four participatory groups.
Respondents who did not participate in any of these activities were assigned to the “Not
Involved” group (N = 179). Respondents who participated in either arts, debate, or student
government, but not in high school sports were assigned to the “Non-sports Only” group (N =
148). If respondents participated in high school sports and at least one other activity (debate,
arts, or student government), they were assigned to the “Sports-Plus” category (N = 364).
Finally, if respondents only participated in high school sports and did not participate in other
non-sports high school activities, they were assigned to the “Sports Only” category (N = 338). In
describing the sample, I also report on respondents’ educational outcomes.
I then use multinomial logistic regression analysis to examine how race, family SES
background, and private school attendance relate to sports and other extracurricular participation.

sampling method. First, a random digit dial (RDD) sample was selected. Next, one age-eligible young adult (18-26
years old) from the household was selected. If more than one age-eligible young adult was present in the household,
the person with the most recent birthday was selected. Cell phone numbers were dialed using RDD sampling, as
well.
52

In all of the regression models, the “Not Involved” group is used as the omitted or referent
category. My first model simply accounts for racial patterns in sports participation, while
controlling for age. My second model adds to the equation measures of family SES and private
school enrollment.
My next set of analyses focus on the relationship between extracurricular involvement
and educational outcomes, while controlling for variations across family SES, private school
enrollment, race, and respondent age. I control for these variables in order to test the association
between sports participation and educational outcomes, net of other important predictors of
academic success. I operationalize family SES using two control variables: youth who come
from low-income families (defined by free/reduced lunch in high school or parental reliance on
public assistance) and respondents who had at least one parent with a BA degree. To control for
one aspect of school context, I include a dummy variable for private high school enrollment (1 =
“Yes”). My control variable for race includes White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Latino
categories and uses White respondents as the omitted/referent category. In addition to these
control variables, the remaining models also control for respondent age.
Table 2.3 shows parameter estimates for high school academic performance, which is
operationalized using an ordinal variable from the CYAS that asked respondents to describe “the
kinds of grades” they received in high school. The variable is coded on a scale from 1 to 7 with a
1 meaning “Mostly D’s or lower” and a 7 representing “Mostly A’s.” I use ordinary least-squares
(OLS) regression to test the relationship between high school sports participation and academic
performance. The remaining three regression models use binary logistic regression and include
control variables for family SES, private school enrollment, race, and respondent age. Table 2.4
shows odds ratios of whether or not a respondent experienced exclusionary discipline in high
53

school. This is a dummy variable where all respondents who reported having been suspended or
expelled during high school were coded as a “1” and all others coded as a “0.” Table 2.5 presents
the odds ratios of high school graduation, operationalized as a dummy variable where all
respondents who held a high school diploma or a GED at the time of the survey are coded as a
“1” and all other high school graduates are coded as a “0.” The final dependent variable,
postsecondary educational (PSE) enrollment, is a dummy variable, where all respondents who
had enrolled in four-year college/university are coded as a “1” and all other respondents are
coded as a “0.” For the regression models with educational attainment as a dependent variable –
high school completion and postsecondary educational enrollment – I exclude respondents who
were still in high school at the time of the survey because of how little time (if any) they had
been out of high school. Additionally, in analyses focused on postsecondary enrollment, I also
exclude respondents who did not graduate from high school because they are categorically
excluded from enrolling in four-year postsecondary education.

Sample Description
Table 2.1 presents descriptive statistics for dependent and control variables. Reflecting
the demographic composition of California’s young adult population, 45% of male respondents
identified as Latino, while roughly one-third identified as White (39%), 10% identified as
Asian/Pacific Islander (API), and 5% identified as Black (See Table 2.1). The vast majority of
these young men (90%) attended public high schools. In terms of family socioeconomic status,
41% of male respondents were raised in low-income households, defined by free and reduced
lunch eligibility in high school or parental reliance on public assistance while respondents were
54

teens.
9
. Further, roughly two-thirds of respondents (64%) did not have a parent with a 4-year
college degree. Meanwhile, 10% attended private school.
In terms of extracurricular involvement, a third (33%) of young men played sports and
engaged in no-other extracurricular activity. Another 35% played sports and were involved in
some other activity. Meanwhile 15% engaged in non-sports extracurricular activities. Seventeen
percent were not involved in any school-based extracurricular activity. In terms of educational
outcomes, 52% of young men reported mostly A, A and B, or B grades. Almost all (94%)
reported graduating having a high school degree or equivalent (GED). And above three quarters,
76%, reported enrolling in some kind of postsecondary educational program. Notably, 25% of
respondents reported being suspended or expelled during high school.

Regression Results
Predicting Extracurricular Participation
Table 2.2 presents odds ratios for extracurricular group membership using multinomial
logistic regression. Results reveal some important nuances in who participates in school-based
activities. Model 1 uses White respondents as the referent category and estimates the odds of
Black, API, and Latino respondents participating in various combinations of extracurricular
activities, versus not participating in any activities. Controlling for respondent age, the only
significant racial differences in participation are seen among the “HS Sports Plus” group. We see
that API respondents are twice as likely as White respondents to have played sports and been
involved in non-sports activities. Conversely, Latino respondents were significantly less likely

9
For this chapter’s analysis, these two criteria were used for operationalizing “low-income” students.
55

than Whites to have been in this activity group. Model 1 shows no differences in extracurricular
participation patterns of White and Black respondents.
Model 2 in Table 2.2 includes family SES and private school enrollment variables. When
these variables are included, the participation gap between White and Latino respondents
becomes statistically insignificant. Conversely, when family SES and private school enrollment
are including in Model 2, the Black-White difference in odds becomes significant for being in
the “HS Sports Plus” group. Given that this relationship was insignificant in Model 1, the
differences in family SES and private school attendance between Black and White respondents
may have been suppressing the differences in odds. Results from Model 2 of Table 2.2 show that
private school enrollment is one of the strongest predictors of extracurricular participation.
Model 2 shows that, controlling for race, family SES, and age, young men who attended private
high schools were 4.5 times more likely to have participated in athletic and non-athletic activities
in school. This squares with past research that found well-resourced schools to provide a greater
quantity and quality of activities for their students (Stearns and Glennie 2010; Glennie and
Stearns 2012).
The remainder of this chapter’s analysis will explore the educational and disciplinary
outcomes associated with high school sports participation, as compared to other forms of
extracurricular involvement. Given that the likelihood of participation is not the same for young
men, how do extracurricular activities relate to school-based outcomes?

Academic Performance
Table 2.3 shows parameter estimates of academic performance using OLS regression.
Respondents evince very different levels of academic performance, across race. Model 1 tests the
56

association between high school academic performance and student background characteristics.
Results for Model 1 confirm known racial/ethnic inequalities, in terms of academic performance
(Kao and Thompson 2003). Controlling for family SES, private school enrollment, and age,
Black respondents performed significantly worse (β = -.67; p < .001) and API respondents
performed significantly better (β = .68; p < .001) than Whites. These beta coefficients may seem
small, but considering that the metric is a scale from 1 to 7, these are substantial changes to a
respondent’s academic performance. Other respondent characteristics were significantly
associated with male academic performance. Young men with at least one college educated
parent earned better grades than their peers, net of race, age, family income, and private school
enrollment. Finally, men from low-income households earned worse grades than their more
affluent peers.
Model 2 includes extracurricular activity participation variables. Including these variables
has little impact on the previous associations from Model 1 between academic performance and
family SES and race. However, when extracurricular activities are added in Model 2, the positive
association between private school attendance and grades disappears. Thus, the academic
benefits of private school attendance might be partially driven by high rates of extracurricular
participation among private school students. However, all other associations from Model 1
persist.
Model 2 also reveals that, independent the effects of race, private school attendance, and
family SES, young men who participated in both sports and non-sports activities earned
significantly better grades than those who did not participate in any activities. Similarly,
respondents who only participated in non-sports activities evince better academic outcomes than
non-participant peers. Curiously, academic benefits did not accrue to all extracurricular
57

participation groups, as young men who only played high school sports did not earn significantly
different grades than young men who did not participate in any school-based activities.

Exclusionary High School Discipline
In addition to academic performance, experiences with punitive discipline in high school
have also been shown to impact educational attainment for young men (Gregory, Skiba, and
Noguera 2010; Terriquez, Chlala, and Sacha 2013). Table 2.4 shows the odds ratios for
suspension and expulsion for young men. Results from Model 1 reveal racial inequality in
punitive discipline. Net the effects of family SES, private school attendance, and age, API
respondents were significantly less likely than Whites to have been suspended or expelled in
high school. Additionally, men with at least one college educated parent were less likely than
their peers to have been suspended or expelled.
The associations from Model 1 persist once extracurricular participation variables are
included. Model 2 shows that, controlling for family SES, private school enrollment, race, and
age, extracurricular participation has no significant association with punitive high school
discipline. In fact, there is surprisingly little variation in each extracurricular participation
group’s odds of experiencing punitive discipline. Young men who participated in extracurricular
activities are as likely to be suspended or expelled as young men who did not participate in any
activities.

High School Completion
Failure to graduate from high school carries serious consequences for young people
(Stearns and Glennie 2006). High school dropouts experience serious economic difficulty,
58

mental health problems, and increased risk of involvement with the criminal justice system over
the course of their lives (Rumberger 1987; Mcneal 1995; Western 2006). Given the high stakes
of high school graduation, this section tests the association between high school sports
involvement and high school graduation
10
.
Table 2.5 reports odds ratios for high school graduation. Model 1 in this table shows that
there are no differences in the predicted likelihood of high school graduation, across race, when
controlling for parental education and family income. Parental education strongly predicts high
school graduation. Controlling for family income, race, and age, respondents with at least one
college-educated parent are nearly 8 times more likely than their peers to have graduated from
high school. Similarly, respondents raised in low-income households were significantly less
likely to be high school graduates. Private school attendance does not appear to be associated
with likelihood of high school graduation.
Model 2 includes extracurricular activity variables, which changes no associations from
Model 1. Model 2 shows that young men who were involved in both sports and non-sports
activities were more likely than non-participants to be high school graduates. In fact, controlling
for family SES and race, the “HS Sport Plus” group was the only participation group whose odds
of graduation differed significantly from non-participants.

10
For this results section, I have omitted respondents who were still enrolled in high school at the time of the CYAS
phone survey. Thus, my sample size drops from N=1,029 to N=947 for this section.
59

Four-Year Post-Secondary Education (PSE) Enrollment
This final results section explores whether high school sports participation is associated
with 4-year PSE enrollment for young men
11
. Table 2.6 shows the odds ratio for young men’s
enrollment in four-year postsecondary education. Model 1 shows that, controlling for race, age,
and family income, young men with at least one college-educated parent are 2.82 times (p <
.001) more likely than their peers to have enrolled in a four-year college. Model 1 also reveals
significant racial differences in the likelihood of college enrollment, net the effect of family SES,
private school enrollment, and age. Compared to Whites, API respondents were 2.35 times (p <
.001) more likely and Latinos were significantly less likely (p < .05) to have enrolled in a four-
year college. Finally, net of family SES, private school enrollment, and race, older respondents
were more likely than younger respondents to have enrolled in four-year PSE.
Model 2 adds extracurricular activity variables, which produces little change to the
coefficients in Model 1. Controlling for family SES, private school enrollment, race, and age,
respondents in both the “HS Sport Only” and “HS Sport-Plus” participation groups were roughly
twice as likely as those in the “No Activities” group to have enrolled in a 4-year college or
university. However, as was the case in nearly every model, young men who participated in
sports and non-sports activities evince the most beneficial educational outcome (p < .001).

11
Analysis for this section omits respondents who were either still enrolled in high school at the time of the CYAS
phone survey, or who had not graduated from high school. Because high school graduation is required for college
enrollment, I only wanted to include respondents for whom 4-year PSE enrollment was possible. This allows me to
more accurately assess the impact of extracurricular participation on young men’s college pursuit. Thus, my sample
size moves from 947 respondents in the previous section to 888 respondents.
60

Conclusions
Findings from this chapter show how race/ethnicity and class are related to
extracurricular participation. First, I find that young men who are able to attend private high
schools participate in both sports and non-sports activities at significantly higher rates than
public school peers. This is important, in light of my other findings. Young men who participate
in both sports and non-sports activities evince the best academic performance, highest graduation
rates, and greatest likelihood for PSE enrollment. Secondly, I find that API young men are most
involved in non-sports activities, as well as in both sports and non-sports activities. It is
surprising that, after controlling for family SES, Black respondents were more likely than Whites
to play sports only and to participate in sports and non-sports activities. This finding contradicts
past research that shows Black male students to have fewer participation opportunities than
Whites.
My findings suggest that high school sports participation, by itself, does not benefit the
educational success of young men more than non-athletic forms of extracurricular involvement.
However, young men who participated in both high school sports and some other form of
extracurricular activity evince considerably better academic outcomes in high school and in the
transition to young adulthood. It is possible that young men who are exceptionally motivated and
connected to their high schools are more likely to do both sports and non-sports activities. These
young men would be expected to excel academically, regardless of their participation in sports.
Unfortunately, I am unable to control for important variables that would help refute the selection
bias in this group, such as academic achievement prior to high school and respondent motivation
or attachment to high school. The second explanation for the academic success of young men in
61

the “HS Sport Plus” group is that they are learning a complimentary set of skills during the
course of participation. Not only do sports and non-sports school activities build different skill
sets, but they potentially expose dual participants to a variety of social groups. Future chapters of
this dissertation will explore these possible individual-level explanations using interviews with
current male student-athletes, some of whom only play sports while others participate in several
extracurricular activities. My interview data also help move beyond individual-level
explanations, by showing how particular school contexts shape the outcomes of extracurricular
participation for young men. As the results from Table 2.2 demonstrate, private and public
school students differ significantly in their participation. My interviews with current student-
athletes at both private and public schools help to explain this association. Indeed, the
institutional features of a school combine with individual student background characteristics to
push young men into or away from certain kinds of extracurricular participation.
Finally, the findings from this chapter present a paradox that future chapters explore:
while participation in sports and non-sports activities clearly benefit the academic outcomes of
young men, it appears to have no significant impact on the likelihood of them experiencing
suspension or expulsion. Why would dual participation improve the academic outcomes of
student-athletes be improved, but not the likelihood of punitive discipline?

62

Table 2.1 Unweighted descriptive statistics of male
respondents in CYAS sample
Race
White
Black
Asian/Pacific Islander (API)
Latino

39%
5%
11%
45%
Avg. Age of Respondent 21.2 years
Low-Income during High School? 41%
At Least 1 Parent w/ College Degree? 36%
School Type
Public
Private

90%
10%
High School Academic Performance
Mostly A’s
Mostly A’s and B’s
Mostly B’s
Mostly B’s and C’s
Mostly C’s
Mostly C’s and D’s
Mostly D’s or Lower
10%
29%
13%
30%
9%
7%
2%
High School Extracurricular Group
Sport Only
Sport-Plus
Non-Sport Only
No Activity

33%
35%
15%
17%
High School Graduate?
*
94%
*

Enrolled in some sort of PSE
*
76%
*

Suspended or Expelled in HS 25%
Unweighted Sample Size N = 1,029
*
Only includes respondents who were not in high school at the time of the survey

63

Table 2.2 Multinomial Logistic Regression of Extracurricular Activity Participation: (N =
1,029) 2011 CYAS
Independent
Variable
HS Sports Only
(N = 338)

HS Sports Plus
(N = 364)

Non-Sports Only
(N = 148)

Model 1 Model 2

Model 1 Model 2

Model 1 Model 2

exp(β) exp(β) exp(β) exp(β) exp(β) exp(β)
Race

White (ref.) ----

---- ---- ---- ----

Black 2.41 2.90
2.50 3.07 * 2.74 2.74
Asian/P.I. 1.61 1.76
2.15 * 2.46 ** 2.17 2.22
Latino .90 1.08

.59 ** 0.75

1.03 0.98

Low-income ---- 0.60 * ---- 0.69
---- 0.92
Parent w/ a B.A.
Degree
---- 0.86

---- 1.00

---- 0.77

Private School ---- 2.36

---- 4.51 *** ---- 2.03

Age of Respondent 1.01 1.00

0.95 0.94

0.94 0.93

DV Referent Category = "No Extracurricular Activities" (N = 179); Data Source: 2010-2011
CYAS; ***Significant at p=<.001; **Significant at p=<.01; *Significant at p=<.05

64

Table 2.3 Parameter estimates for models of young men's high school academic achievement (1-7 scale of
high school grades; 1="mostly D's or worse", 7="mostly A's"): (N = 1,029) 2011 CYAS
Model
Parameter 1 2
β Std. Error β Std. Error
Background Characteristics
Low-Income in HS -0.23 * 0.10 -0.22 * 0.10
Parent w/ a B.A. Degree 0.50 *** 0.10 0.49 *** 0.10
Private School 0.34 * 0.15 0.25 0.15
Race
White (reference) --- --- ---
Black -0.67 *** 0.21 -0.71 *** 0.21
Asian/Pacific Islander 0.68 *** 0.15 0.63 *** 0.15
Latino -0.19 0.11 -0.16 0.11
Age of Respondent -0.01 0.12 -0.01
Extracurricular Participation

No Activity (ref.)
--- --- --- ---
Only HS Sport
--- --- 0.15 0.13
HS Sport and Other Activity
--- --- 0.56 *** 0.13
Only Non-Sport Activity
--- --- 0.30 * 0.15
Intercept 4.97 *** 0.39 4.56 *** 0.40

R
2
0.113 0.133
df 7 10
BIC -221 -250
* p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 BIC = N*ln(1 - R2) + p*ln(N)

65

Table 2.4 Estimates (odds ratios) from selected logistic regression models of young men's
likelihood of high school suspension or expulsion (=1, 0 otherwise): (N = 1,029) 2011 CYAS
Model
Independent Variables 1 2
exp(β) exp(β)
Background Characteristics
Low-Income in HS 1.28 1.26
Parent w/ a B.A. Degree 0.55 *** 0.55 **
Private School 0.62 0.64
Race
White (reference) ---- ----
Black 1.59 1.64
Asian/Pacific Islander 0.24 *** 0.24 ***
Latino 0.93 0.92
Age of Respondent
Extracurricular Participation
No Activity (ref.) ---- ----
Only HS Sport ---- 0.71
HS Sport and Other Activity ---- 0.77
Only Non-Sport Activity ---- 0.74
Intercept 0.14 ** 0.19 *

Chi-square 55 53
df 6 8
BIC -9 9
* p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 BIC = N*ln(1 - R2) + p*ln(N)

66

Table 2.5 Estimates (odds ratios) from selected logistic regression models of young men's
likelihood of high school graduation (=1, 0 otherwise): (N = 947) 2011 CYAS
Model
Independent Variables 1 2
exp(β) exp(β)
Background Characteristics
Low-Income in HS 0.43 ** 0.42 **
Parent w/ a B.A. Degree 8.15 *** 8.17 ***
Private School 0.64 0.51
Race
White (reference) ---- ----
Black 0.70 0.62
Asian/Pacific Islander 4.49 4.09
Latino 0.97 1.05
Age of Respondent 0.94 0.93
Extracurricular Participation
No Activity (ref.) ---- ----
Only HS Sport ---- 1.47
HS Sport and Other Activity ---- 2.90 **
Only Non-Sport Activity ---- 1.40
Intercept 69.4 ** 45.04 **

Chi-square 49 56
df 7 8
BIC 5 6
* p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 BIC = N*ln(1 - R2) + p*ln(N)

67

Table 2.6 Estimates (odds ratios) from selected logistic regression models of young men's
likelihood of enrolling in 4-year college/university (=1, 0 otherwise): 2011 CYAS (N = 888)
Model
Independent Variables 1 2
exp(β) exp(β)
Background Characteristics
Low-Income in HS 0.77 0.79
Parent w/ a B.A. Degree 2.82 *** 2.84 ***
Private School 1.54 1.39
Race
White (reference) ---- ----
Black 0.74 0.67
Asian/Pacific Islander 2.35 *** 2.25 **
Latino 0.68 * 0.69 *
Age of Respondent 1.19 *** 1.20 ***
Extracurricular Participation
No Activity (ref.) ---- ----
Only HS Sport ---- 1.80 **
HS Sport and Other Activity ---- 2.28 ***
Only Non-Sport Activity ---- 1.62
Intercept 0.01 *** 0.00 ***

Chi-square 151 163
df 7 10
BIC -97 -86
* p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 BIC = N*ln(1 - R2) + p*ln(N)

68

CHAPTER 3
MILES AWAY, WORLDS APART: HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS PROGRAMS
IN THE CITY OF ANGELS
Past research on high school sports participation leaves under-explored the ways that
school-specific processes impact student-athlete motivations and meaning making in
interscholastic sports activities. As discussed in previous chapters, we know a great deal about
the outcomes associated with sports participation and other types of extracurricular involvement,
but very little about the processes through which these outcomes materialize (Feldman and
Matjasko 2005; Feldman Farb and Matjasko 2012). There are good reasons to expect that high
school sports participation looks very different across school context. Institutional aspects of a
high school, such as its academic curriculum and disciplinary apparatus, operate uniquely
depending on the racial composition and socioeconomic background of its student body. High
schools in which the majority of students are Black and Latino tend to have disproportionately
high rates of school dropout, poor standardized test scores, low rates of college enrollment, and
high rates of suspension and expulsion, as compared to affluent, majority-White schools
(Noguera 2003; Harris 2006; Ream and Rumberger 2008).
The three high schools in my sample are located in Los Angeles. This is significant, as
large urban centers like Los Angeles contain neighborhoods that are highly segregated by race
and household income (Orfield and Lee 2005; Orfield, Siegel-Hawley, and Kucsera 2011). The
concentration of poverty and wealth in particular neighborhoods produces vast differences in
school resources, and thus very unique school experiences for students. In Los Angeles, two
young people can live less than one mile apart from one another, yet attend drastically different
high schools in terms of educational opportunity. There are good reasons to expect that
69

extracurricular opportunities in Los Angeles high schools are unevenly distributed, as well. A
school’s size, funding level and student-teacher ratio impacts both the quality and quantity of
extracurricular activities that it offers (McNeal 1999; Langbein and Bess 2002). Black and
Latino high school students are significantly more likely to attend overcrowded and poorly
resourced schools (Orfield and Lee 2005). Thus, these students are likely to attend schools with
fewer and lower quality extracurricular opportunities (McNeal 1999; Kozol 2006; Stearns and
Glennie 2010).
I began this project with the expectation that the male high school sports experience
would look different across the three schools in my sample. I hypothesized that male student-
athletes in poorly resourced schools would be more intensely invested in sports as both an
identity resource and means for school attachment. Past research argues that student-athletes are
a social group that represents a high school’s mainstream values that teachers and administrators
seek to instill in their students (Eckert 1989; Morris 2012; Bettie 2014). Rather than this
undifferentiated description of student-athletes at all schools, my project approaches high school
sports as a puzzle piece that fits differently into each school’s larger constellation of structures,
cultures, and processes; I refer to the reciprocal relationship between a school’s sports program
and its other organizational structures as its “athletic ecology” and develop this concept further in
Chapter Four. Even if similar outcomes are achieved through sports participation (i.e. better
academic performance, greater school attachment, higher educational aspirations, etc.), I
predicted that the processes that led to these outcomes would be different at each school.
To test this idea and to supplement past research on high school extracurricular
participation, I collected original survey and interview data from male student-athletes at three
70

high schools in Los Angeles: College Prep High, Park Heights High, and Pacific Coast High
12
.
My mixed-method, comparative approach allows me to explore the outcomes associated with
sports, as well as the processes that might contribute to these outcomes. I argue in Chapter Two
that participating in both sports and non-sports activities benefits the school-related outcomes of
young men in California. However, the data is unable to illuminate any nuances in how these
outcomes are produced. Thus, it is unclear why sports matter in tandem with non-sports
activities. It could be that some young men were inspired by academically focused teammates
and club members. Perhaps a demanding coach checked each player’s academic progress. Or
maybe teachers and administrators looked favorably on highly engaged students. The next two
chapters move beyond theorizing quantitative relationships by talking directly to current male
student-athletes at three Los Angeles high schools.
Data presented in the next two chapters show that high school sports programs are
produced by – and are sometimes productive of – the broader school context. Any explanation of
how, why, and for whom sports participation matters requires a thorough accounting of the
institutional context in which sports participation occurs. This chapter provides a description of
the three high schools that my respondents attended. I outline the important ways that the athletic
programs of these high schools differ and explain how these differences belie more fundamental
differences in each school’s athletic ecology. I use ethnographic data and interview data from
current student-athletes to explore three key components of each school’s sports program:
physical athletic infrastructure, coaching staff, and the kinds of student-athletes that constitute

12
As previously mentioned, I use pseudonyms throughout this dissertation to refer to all high schools and people.
This includes all student-athletes, coaches, and school personnel.
71

the teams. I conclude the chapter by discussing why and how the differences in each school’s
sports program fundamentally shapes the student-athlete experience. The purpose of this chapter
is to describe each school’s sports program, which was my project’s point of entry from which to
examine other aspects of the school from the student-athlete’s perspective. Chapter Four then
builds on this chapter by exploring how sports participation at each school uniquely impacts the
academic, social, and disciplinary experiences of male student-athletes. This is a much more
nuanced story than previous theories of extracurricular participation suggest. A contextual
comparison will show how the experiences of interscholastic sports differ by both individual and
school-level factors.

The Story of Three High School Sports Programs in Los Angeles
The three high schools in my sample are relatively close to one another, ranging from 4
to 10 miles apart. Despite their close geographic proximity, each school’s student body’s racial
composition and socioeconomic makeup is unique. These differences reflect the reputations and
pre-enrollment expectations that the young men in my sample described. My 60 interviews with
male student-athletes from these schools revealed that the cultures and structures of each school
are very different. Chapter Four discusses how male student-athletes navigated and experienced
their school’s academic climate, social status system, and school disciplinary policies. To help
make sense of how my respondents experience these non-athletic school structures, the following
sections describe each school’s sports program.
I use ethnographic field notes from all of my trips to each school’s campus to describe the
sports facilities and coaching staff at each school. From my preliminary online research, I knew
that these three schools were unique in several ways from one another. For example, I knew that
72

the annual tuition at College Prep High was around $18,000 and that 96% of its students went on
to four-year colleges or universities. I also knew that Pacific Coast High was located in an
affluent part of the Los Angeles and had a respectable Academic Performance Index (API)
13

score of 7/10. I also knew that Park Heights had an API score of 3/10 and that, since 2009, less
than 8% of its students were proficient in Math and less than a quarter of its students were
proficient in English, as measured by the California Standards Test. This information was useful
for selecting comparison schools, yet told only part of the story about what it was like to be a
student-athlete in these schools.
To help illustrate the school-level differences more fully, the following sections briefly
introduce each school’s athletic infrastructure and coaches that I met while gathering my data.
Insights from these coaches reveal some of the key differences between each school’s sports
programs. The sports programs at both College Prep and Park Heights seem to be very important
and both schools tended to have alumni come back to work as teachers and coaches. Despite
these similarities, College Prep and Park Heights have vastly different resource levels and school
environments. Pacific Coast High, on the other hand, does not historically invest much in their
sports program and the majority of its coaches were “walk-ons” who do not teach at the school,
which minimizes the synergy between the school’s sports program and non-sports structures.
The final section of this chapter uses interview data from current student-athletes to show how
each school’s reputation shaped the high school selection process for young men. For some

13
The Academic Performance Index (API) is a scale that measures school performance by dividing schools into 10
equal groups (deciles)—so a 1/10 means the school falls into the lowest 10% of schools and a 10/10 means it falls
into the highest 10% of schools. Each school’s ranking is based on its student body’s performance on the
Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) test and California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). I do not
provide an API score for College Prep because it is a private high school and thus is exempt from state-mandated
standardized testing.
73

student-athletes, their high school’s sports program and previous relationships with a coach at the
school played a major role in their school selection process. Indeed, some of my respondents’
high school sports careers began well before they even set foot on campus.

College Prep High
I arrived to College Prep High’s campus to survey the football team as they were
completing an early summer weight lifting session in June. After checking in with the security
station in the middle of the school’s landscaped roundabout, I proceeded to the weight room. On
the way, I walked between three-story brick buildings that bore the names of notable alumni or
donors to the school. After arriving to the weight room, I learned that it had been recently
remodeled via a successful fundraising campaign. The assistant coach overseeing the day’s
workout told me proudly that the College Prep weight room was designed by the same person
who designed the USC weight room. The room was immaculate. All of the weights and racks
were new, and the dumbbell weights all had the College Prep logo stamped on both ends. There
was a full-length mirror that ran along the far wall, behind the four occupied bench press
stations. While I waited for the workout to conclude, I observed several of the 50+ players
examining themselves and one another in the mirror, as they flexed and joked in between weight
lifting sets. All team members wore the same “College Prep Football” t-shirt and shorts. Young
men moved from station to station about every 5-7 minutes when the coach blew his whistle. The
weight room designer was not College Prep’s only connection to the nationally ranked USC
football team. College Prep’s head coach, Coach Russell, was a former assistant for the Trojans
and brought a wealth of football experience with him to the school. He had his own office and
74

team meeting room at the school, which is where I administered my survey to the team when
their weight session concluded.
Indeed, College Prep was far and away the best resourced sports program in my sample.
The physical facilities were all top-notch. In addition to its newly remodeled weight room,
College Prep also has an Olympic-sized pool, a baseball complex with covered batting cages and
electronic scoreboard, and huge wood-floor basketball court on campus. These resources extend
beyond the physical athletic infrastructure. Coach Lopez, College Prep’s cross-country coach,
responded to my first email from Big Bear Lake, where he was overseeing his team’s annual
altitude training in preparation for the start of the fall sports season. By training at high elevation,
College Prep’s runners develop greater lung capacity and gain a competitive advantage. This
elite-level training stands in stark contrast to an announcement that the cross-country coach from
Pacific Coast, Coach Reynolds, posted on the team’s webpage. In this announcement, she listed
the date and place of team tryouts, which included instructions to, “Please wear appropriate
running attire and shoes. Jeans and skating shoes are not appropriate.”
I was surprised at how many of the College Prep High coaches – six of the nine that I met
– were alumni of the school. When I asked College Prep respondents to explain why this was,
they said that the school’s brotherhood and tradition create a sense of responsibility among
alumni to give back to the school in some way. Some respondents also pointed to the tendency
for the school community to “look out” for alumni who might be looking for a teaching or
coaching position. As later sections of this chapter show, the themes of “brotherhood” and
“tradition” also came up when College Prep students explained their school selection process.

75

Pacific Coast High
I met Pacific Coast High’s football team at their 6 AM spring practice, which took place
on a torn-up field. One corner of the formerly green space served as a softball field and the other
as a baseball diamond with a tattered backstop that more closely resembled a recycled scrap heap
than part of a sports facility. The team was forced to practice at this time because Pacific Coast’s
in-season teams (e.g. girls’ softball and boys’ baseball teams) used the small field in the
afternoon. Beside this poorly maintained, heavily used field loomed a new football and track
stadium that was undergoing the finishing touches of construction. All of the coaches I met at
Pacific Coast High seemed to be in awe of the new stadium. The coaches had become used to
training their teams with sub-par facilities and seemed amazed that the school was able to
allocate the necessary funds for the field to be built. Both the baseball and football teams were
forced to use other schools’ fields and facilities as their home field while the new stadium was
being built. One of the assistant football coaches, the offensive line coach who was a Pacific
Coast High alum from 2006, said that the old football field and stadium used to be called “the
swamp” because of how often it flooded, forcing the football and soccer teams to play with
standing water on the field. He felt like the wet old field gave them an advantage because it
slowed fast or more athletic teams down and forced them to play a more grind-it-out, physical
style of football, which he said favored Pacific Coast’s teams. Pacific Coast’s head football
coach, Coach Reynolds, was not a teacher at the school. Rather, he oversaw the football team in
addition to working a full-time job in South Los Angeles. Coach Meyers, Pacific Coast’s athletic
director, cross-country coach, track/field coach, and history/social science teacher, explained that
cuts to the school’s athletic budget make it difficult to convince Pacific Coast’s faculty members
to volunteer to coach the school’s sports teams. Thus, in addition to historically limited facilities
76

and sports equipment, Pacific Coast’s teams are often run by a rotating door of coaches with
little or no attachment to the school.
Faculty members like Coach Meyers, who are passionate about providing quality sports
experiences to their students, are left to shoulder unusually heavy burdens. This was made
abundantly clear on the fall afternoon that I met Coach Meyers to survey the Pacific Coast cross-
country team. She emerged from the locker room with her hair in a ponytail, Oakley wrap-
around sports glasses on, and her infant son strapped to her chest via a Baby Bjorn. She had two
female student trainers trailing behind her with clipboards and water bottles as she marched
toward me. She gave my hand a firm shake, looked at her Nike sports watch, and then turned to
yell at a male team member who had just come out of the boys’ locker room: “Go get everybody
else and tell them they’re late already!” The young man quickly turned heal and went back in the
locker room. I heard his muffled yell to hurry along his male teammates who began jogging out
of the locker room shortly thereafter. Coach Meyers was the only coach for both the men’s and
women’s cross country teams. In total, she estimated that there were 60 or 70 total team
members, of which I surveyed 36 males that day. As I observed the mass of cross country team
members stretching, talking, and chasing each other around, it seemed like an incredibly large
group for one coach to manage. Hearing Coach Meyers raise her voice and issue sharp
commands for the men to line up on the wall and for the women to begin their warm-up lap, I
could see how she managed such a large group. While we waited for a couple of straggling male
team members to arrive, I asked her about how she managed the team all by herself. With her
baby on her chest, facing out towards me, Coach Meyers shrugged and said flatly, “If I don’t
coach the team, the team goes away. And that isn’t fair to the kids.” She lamented that several of
77

the men’s team coaches this academic year – including the football coach, baseball coach, and
soccer coach – were “walk-ons” or coaches that had no faculty affiliation with the school.

Park Heights High
I arrived to campus at Park Heights High during the second week of summer vacation
and had to walk through a sliding chain-link fence, topped with razor wire, to reach the main
office. After checking in with a secretary who appeared to be in her 60’s I was given directions
to the weight room to meet with Coach Williams of the football team. I had a hard time finding
the weight room and spent about 15 minutes wandering in a labyrinth of identical portables, all
painted in the school’s colors. As I walked around, I noticed the signs for the different magnet
programs or “schools” that Park Heights housed: digital film making and theatrical arts; school
of business and entrepreneurship; law and public service management; and the Math & Science
magnet. Park Heights High’s physical appearance is that of a school seeking to remake itself.
There are two buildings on campus that were built since 2010, the only buildings higher than two
stories: the new gymnasium and the building that houses the Math & Science magnet program.
The rest of Park Heights’s classrooms are split between the main school building and a series of
portable classrooms. It is telling that the two newest buildings on campus are the gymnasium and
the Math & Science building. As I discuss in Chapter Four, Park Heights respondents described
their path to high school success and post-high school mobility as running through one of those
two buildings. Respondents felt that failure to access and excel in one of these two buildings,
which symbolize the school’s college-prep curricular track and athletic program, doomed them
to low-wage jobs and possibly dropping out of high school.
78

Upon entering the weight room, a small, sweaty room not much bigger than the portable
buildings I had been wandering amongst, I immediately noticed a series of large cloth pennants
hanging all around the top of the room. They displayed the names, numbers, and professional
teams that Park Heights’s football players had gone on to play for after graduating. There were
more hanging pennants in the weight room than young men that day, many of whom wore polo
shirts or jeans while lifting weights. I found Coach Williams in his small office where he
expressed frustration at how few team members had shown up for the day’s weight lifting
session. He assured me that more would come before the start of outdoor practice, when I was to
survey the team. Coach Williams felt that the poor attendance was indicative of a lack of
commitment to the program, which he explained was very different than 5-10 years ago when the
school was a powerhouse football program. The walls of the small coach’s office were covered
with news articles on former Park Heights players, coverage of past city and CIF championship
teams, and college scholarship offer letters for past players. Some of these pieces of nostalgia
were 15-20 years old.
Coach Williams, a Park Heights alum, had been teaching and coaching at the school for
over 15 years when I met him. He had been the head junior varsity football coach for several
years and had recently been given the head varsity coach position. Like Coach Williams, several
other coaches at Park Heights were alumni and had long histories with the school. Coach Jackson
had been the head varsity basketball coach since the early 1990s. Coach Phillips, the head track
and field coach, began running the program since the late 1980s and has won 13 city track titles.
Finally, Coach Colvin taught and coached baseball at Park Heights since the late 1990s. In
addition to their long tenure as teachers and coaches, Coaches Colvin and Williams also both
graduated from Park Heights during the late-‘80s. Like the coaches at College Prep, these men
79

cited pride in the school and a desire to “give back” as the reason why they worked and coached
at the school. However, unlike the College Prep coaches, Coach Williams and Coach Colvin
openly lamented the present state of the school and its student body. During our short
conversations, both men spoke longingly about “the good old days” of the school when
apparently Park Heights’s sports teams and academic quality were better.
As we walked to meet his team in study hall, I asked Coach Colvin to explain this
change. Coach Colvin blamed the school district’s school selection and busing system for the
decline of the academic and athletic quality of Park Heights. Overall, Coach Colvin seemed very
pessimistic about Park Heights’s students, including the baseball players that he coached. He
referred them multiple times as “mental midgets” who were overly entitled, disrespectful, and
had no sense of the school’s history or tradition. “Nobody wants to come here. It’s simple as that.
And the district allows parents and students to find ways to go to other schools. They pick ‘em
up right here in front of the school every morning [to take them to other schools]!” Coach Colvin
felt that the highly talented students and athletes were the ones most often taking advantage of
the busing option, which led to a “brain drain” on the community surrounding Park Heights.
Indeed, at the time of my project, the overall enrollment at Park Heights had diminished so much
in the last three years that several teachers were being laid off next school year. The next section
explores how my respondents came to enroll in their respective high schools.

Social Class, High School Reputation, and School Selection
The quality of a student’s neighborhood (i.e. the home values and number of home
owners) often predicts the quality of the schools that a student can attend (Levy 1995). Young
people whose parents can afford to buy homes in affluent neighborhoods often have access to
80

high-performing public schools that enable both short- and long-term academic success (Duncan
and Murnane 2011; Sampson 2012; Lareau 2014). Conversely, young people who live in less
affluent areas are more likely to be assigned to public schools that are poorly resourced. In short,
residential segregation corresponds with educational inequality (Owens 2016). Low-income
Black and Latino students are the social group most impacted by this pattern, as their parents and
grandparents were systematically excluded from desirable neighborhoods. White, middle-class
families have significantly more control of political processes and educational resources due to
historic race-based residential segregation (Pattillo 2008). Public school students in Los Angeles
who do not wish to attend their “school of residence”
14
have four options: transfer with the
permission of both sending and receiving schools, apply and get selected to the district Magnet
Program, get into a charter school, or use a residential address in the desired school’s catchment
zone. To successfully navigate these options, students and their families often work very hard
and need knowledge about how the process works. This process is especially arduous for low-
income families of color.
I began this project with the goal of exploring how interscholastic sports participation
shaped young men's high school experiences, worldviews, and educational outcomes. However,
my early interviews with student-athletes revealed that young men were acutely aware of a
school’s academic and athletic reputation prior to enrolling. The school selection process played
out very differently for young men at the three high schools in my sample. Thus, before I can
understand why these young men chose to play sports, or how sports participation impacted their

14
The term “school of residence” is the language used on the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)
website to refer to the school a student is assigned to, based on their residential address.
81

high school experiences, I need to explore their motivations for attending their particular high
school. Some respondents chose their school in order to escape a poor performing local high
school. Others reported having a relationship with a high school coach during grade school.
Finally, others felt that they simply were “unlucky” and were forced to attend a school.
Past research on high school sports posits that highly motivated students self-select into
sports participation, which results in student-athletes having much school outcomes than non-
athletes (Fejgin 1994; Videon 2002; Feldman and Matjasko 2005). Thus, the benefits of sports
participation may be overstated. Some student-athletes would likely do well in school, regardless
of their sports participation. Indeed, there was clear evidence of positive selection among my
respondents. However, this was different than the self-selection bias hypothesized by
extracurricular activity researchers. My respondents were sorted along social class lines well
before they stepped onto a high school sports field, or even a high school campus. When they
began their high school careers, sample respondents brought with them unique sets of resources
and challenges associated with their intersectional social location. The reputations and local
understandings of each school, as well as the active involvement of some high school coaches
during eighth grade sports leagues, led to certain young men attending certain schools. Some
young men in my sample defined their school’s quality in direct comparison to other schools,
and used this comparison to justify why they chose to attend their particular school.

College Prep High: Legacies, Catholic school pipeliners, and public school kids
During one of my final interviews, I asked Mark the same question that I had asked all of
the respondents: how did you come to attend your high school? By this point in my project, I
could almost perfectly predict the kind of response I would get from College Prep students.
82

Brotherhood. Tradition. A desire to be a “better man.” Sometimes it felt as if my College Prep
respondents were giving me a sales pitch straight from one of the school’s colorful brochures.
Mark, a nearly 7-foot senior basketball player at College Prep, shrugged his broad shoulders,
twisted his mouth to the side, and crammed all three common themes into his response:
For me, it was always going to be College Prep. Because my grandpa was a Prep grad, my
six uncles are all Prep grads, and my two older brothers also went to Prep. So I’m kind of
trying to carry on the tradition. I just kind of knew it was College Prep…I wasn’t necessarily
drawn to Prep because of its athletic reputation. What I tell people is, just seeing the way that
my brothers grew over their four years there – as students, as athletes, as men – in all aspects
of their life, it was like, “Ok, this is gonna be the place for me, too.”

Mark’s school selection process resembled nearly all of the young men I spoke with from Prep.
Despite having their pick of several prestigious private schools – and often a highly ranked
public school near their homes – College Prep respondents all said that Prep was their first
choice. Indeed, given the influence of parents that Mark and other Prep student-athletes
described, it is clear that not all young men were the ones making their school selection.
Respondents fell into one of three groups: the legacies, the Catholic pipeliners, and the “public
school kids.” The legacies, like Mark, had brothers, uncles, fathers, and sometimes grandfathers
who attended College Prep. These young men grew up aspiring to follow the other men in their
families and felt like they had an advantage in applying to the school because of their family
name. The Catholic pipeliners (or simply “pipeliners”) were the most common group at College
Prep. These young men attended a Catholic K-8 grade school and knew older classmates from
their school or parish who had attended College Prep. These young men were typically not sure
that they would attend the school until their 8
th
grade year when they visited several private high
schools via campus visitation days or open house events. The final, and least common, group of
College Prep respondents attended public elementary and middle schools. The “public school
83

kids,” as they referred to themselves, were generally Black and Latino young men who were
only able to attend College Prep via significant financial aid. As I show in Chapter Four, the
public school kids reported feeling like outsiders at times. Compared to the legacies and the
pipeliners, the public school kids did not know many people coming into the school and reported
a much steeper learning curve academically.
The majority of College Prep students are from affluent families and some live in the
most desirable neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area. Eighty-three percent of College Prep
respondents had a parent with at least a four-year college degree and nearly half of them (48.3%)
had a parent with a graduate degree. With few exceptions, these were young men who could
have gone wherever they wanted. Thus, I was interested to see why they chose College Prep, and
the extent to which sports played into that decision. Michael, a White football player, explains
what drew him to College Prep:
Um, just sorta like, the environment, the campus, the atmosphere, I just kinda liked
everything Prep represented, sorta. Because it is more academically well known, like,
more…it’s just a harder school than St. Matthew’s for the most part. And then it also has a
better athletic reputation, honestly, than St. Matthew’s, and I just kinda like that uh, like the
challenge it presented…it was definitely bigger than football or just sports.

Like Michael, several Prep student-athletes described the quality of the school in relative terms;
they chose Prep because it is better in this way or that way, than other schools. While sports
seem to play a small part in the decision making process, none of my 20 respondents from
College Prep said that they chose the school simply to play sports. In fact, Prep student-athletes
felt that picking a high school or college based strictly on athletic opportunities was short
sighted. Respondents identified several other private high schools in the Los Angeles area where
sports are the main, sometimes only, draw. The collective narrative of “College Prep excels at
more than just sports” positioned the school, and by extension its students, as superior to other
84

high schools. This seemed to be an especially important narrative for Prep students, who felt that
the school’s athletic dominance had waned in the past five years or so.
The canary in the athletic cave is College Prep’s football team, which had ceded its
prominence at the school to other, less popular sports such as volleyball, water polo, and soccer.
According to respondents, this decline was the result of both an increase in the school’s
admissions standards and other private high schools beginning to “recruit” incoming students
based on athletic ability. As Dominic, a Black star baseball player explains:
I think that the standards [at College Prep] have risen, but Prep is different from other
Catholic high schools in the LA Archdiocese because we don’t recruit. So we just take
whatever applicants we get. We take ‘em, we admit them and if they wanna play football,
they’ll play football. And if we don’t have any Andre Adams’s or Greg Evans’s [top college
football recruits at College Prep] in our class, then we just don’t have those. And then their
senior year, if we don’t have another class behind them that’s good, then their senior year, we
just won’t be that good. So we’re working with what we have, whereas other schools, they
know what they’re bringing in. And they’re building teams around that. They’re recruiting
student-athletes by saying things like, “Oh, we have a spot for you on our team!” Some of
my friends that are on the basketball team were recruited by like Blessed Virgin, and Bishop
Murphy and Holy Angels for basketball and that’s how they all did it. They saw them at a
travel ball game during seventh or eighth grade and then they talked to them.

Jake, a White junior football player, also felt that other Catholic schools recruit athletes. Jake
believes other private schools target, “a lot of kids from South Central. Kids who they can tell,
you know, ‘You can come here and get a private school education,” you know? So that they’ll
come and play football for them.” Andre, a Black all-state football player and sprinter on the
track team, lives in South Central Los Angeles. He transferred to College Prep after spending his
freshman year at rival Bishop Murphy High, a co-ed Catholic high school:
Starting in about eighth grade, [Catholic high] schools were recruiting me to come
there…They’ll come to your games, um, call your parents…so like go to practices. I dunno,
schools like Bishop Murphy, Blessed Virgin. College Prep doesn't really do that but that was
the school that I wanted to go to. But College Prep’s kind of a deal where you got to be really
hands-on with your parents. So my parents aren't, you know, really involved with all that
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stuff…So I went to Bishop Murphy. It was easy to get in, you know, they really wanted me
to come there.

Andre was given a full-ride scholarship to Bishop Murphy and felt like he and other Black
student-athletes were only admitted to the school to play sports. He felt like his teachers and
classmates at Bishop Murphy expected him to be a jock and to not care about or do well in
school. Andre was allowed to transfer to College Prep after receiving recommendation letters
from two alumni who oversee the school’s Black Student Union.
College Prep’s higher admissions standards and its refusal to recruit students based solely
for sports means that students from low-income families and public grade schools do not often
enroll at College Prep. Prep offers need-based aid to admitted students. The school’s website
states that roughly 28% of its students receive some form of financial aid, but no scholarships or
grants explicitly support racial diversity. The majority of the school’s outreach to prospective
students of color is via weekend tutoring and entrance exam prep programs. This program is
designed to bring Black and Latino 7
th
and 8
th
graders from Catholic grade schools onto campus
and introduce them to current Prep students of color. Black and Latino respondents felt that these
efforts were important, but that they did not significantly make College Prep more accessible to
low-income students of color. The $18,000 annual tuition is prohibitively expensive for many
families unless their son earns a scholarship. Thus, the vast majority of Prep’s students are from
wealthy families, attended Catholic K-through-8 grade schools, have familial connections to the
schools, or are exceptionally academically gifted. Oscar, a Latino freshman member of the cross-
country team, was the only person from his large East Los Angeles grade school to even apply to
Prep. Oscar describes himself and his brother as “the best students and athletes in East L.A.”
Oscar’s transition to a highly competitive, majority-White high school was difficult:
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So coming from being like the best right there [in East L.A.] to being a little fish in a big
pond here, it was a really big eye-opener and um coming around all these people who were
also like taking honors pre-calculus as freshman or in eighth grade year, which is like
surprising…‘cause College Prep is just like a handful of the best, not really that much people
can be accepted here. So um over time, like at first, I didn’t feel welcomed and I thought
um…At first, ‘cause I didn’t know anybody. I felt like, all these white guys are playing
football or all these like water polo guys are just together. At first ‘cause I didn’t really know
how to fit in to this place.

Nearly every young man from College Prep said that he was receiving an excellent education.
These young men and their families made the conscious and expensive decision to attend the
school because they felt that it was one of the best schools in the area. Most notably, respondents
of color, and those from low-income families, felt very fortunate to have been accepted to the
school and believed that the school was preparing them for success after high school. In general,
respondents described College Prep’s sports program as a small part of their decision to attend
the school. Chapter Four will show that, despite sports being a minor reason for attending the
school, sports play a large role in the high school lives of some College Prep students.

Pacific Coast High: The locals and the bussers
Overall, the young men from Pacific Coast High displayed much less school pride than
College Prep respondents. Pacific Coast student-athletes also had much fewer school options
than College Prep respondents. College Prep respondents and their families have the ability to
pick their high school the way some people shop for a new car; whichever school meets their
criteria can be had for the right price. Pacific Coast student-athletes were either assigned to
attend the school based on where they live or managed to gain entry in other ways. Twelve of the
twenty student-athletes from Pacific Coast lived in the affluent neighborhood around the school,
while eight lived significantly far away from the school. These two groups of students, which I
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refer to as the locals and the bussers, followed very different literal and symbolic paths to Pacific
Coast.
Each of the eight bussers were either Black or Latino and often took hour-long bus rides
to and from school. Each of these young men described their school of residence as undesirable
for various reasons and, with the help of their parents, found a way to enroll at Pacific Coast
High. Ronnie, a Black junior on the Pacific Coast football team, spent his first year of high
school at Edgemont High School in South Los Angeles. The coffee shop where I interviewed
Ronnie was located two blocks away from Edgemont, and roughly a 45-minute drive from
Pacific Coast’s campus – significantly longer via bus. “My dad didn’t like the school at
Edgemont because it was like a bad school. Yeah, a lotta fights, girls getting pregnant at young
ages, and he didn’t… want me to be around that environment,” Ronnie explains. To give his son
a better shot at going to college, and avoid trouble and distractions, Ronnie’s dad decided to
transfer him to a different high school. According to Ronnie, he and his family chose Pacific
Coast High, “because I’ve been knowin’ some of the coaches ‘cause I played Pop Warner
football for the Southern California Falcons. Coach Martinez was a defensive coach at Pacific
Coast and said that the school was like really good and plus we knew it was in a good area.” In
order to attend Pacific Coast, Ronnie and his family had to get permission from both Edgemont
High and Pacific Coast to transfer. In making this choice, Ronnie lost his district-provided
transportation and now rides the city’s Metro bus to school roughly an hour each way. Like
Ronnie, many of the bussers said that Pacific Coast’s location in a desirable neighborhood was
an important factor in their family’s decision.
In general, bussers’ parents were central to their school transfer process. Some bussers
did not want to transfer schools and were fine staying at their school of residence, where they
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had childhood friends and could ride a bike or walk to and from school. Carlos, a sophomore
football player, was one of these bussers. Carlos was slated to attend City Center High, which he
admits has a reputation for “drug addicts, drug dealers, and alcoholics.” Despite the school’s
reputation, Carlos didn’t mind the idea of going to City Center High. “It’s where all of my
friends [from middle school] were gonna go. I figured that I could get a good education there if I
worked hard,” says Carlos. Carlos’s parents had other ideas. “My dad got me into Pacific Coast
‘cause he works around there so…I heard that Pacific Coast had a lot of activities to help you in
your school academics and all that so I was like, ‘Ok, I’ll just try it out.’ And I liked it, so I
decided to stay.”
According to the bussers, sports played a very small part in their decision to transfer to
Pacific Coast. A handful of bussers like Ronnie had previous relationships with coaches, but the
main draw for bussers and their parents seems to have been Pacific Coast’s academic quality and
non-sport extracurricular offerings. Brandon, a Latino senior on the baseball team, was coached
in Little League by Pacific Coast’s head baseball coach. Like Ronnie, this sports-related
relationship put Pacific Coast on Brandon’s when his parents encouraged him to transfer out of
his school of residence. Brandon was originally assigned to attend Broadview High, a large high
school in South Los Angeles with an API score of 2/10. Brandon explains how he came to attend
Pacific Coast High:
I’ve heard some bad things about Broadview…But I knew the [baseball] coach there. ‘Cause
Coach Lee’s dad was the coach [at Pacific Coast High] before him. I played little league at
North Venice and he was coaching there and he was ‘Hey, you should come to Pacific
Coast,’ and my dad was, “Perfect, it's on my way to work.' Because he didn’t want me going
to Broadview at all.

Without past relationships with Pacific Coast coaches, bussers like Ronnie and Brandon might
have tried to enroll in a different school to avoid their school of residence. However, their
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relationships with coaches brought Pacific Coast to their attention. While playing sports at
Pacific Coast was not a key motivation for the bussers’ school selection, it played a large role in
their social lives. Chapter Four explores the social lives of the bussers in greater detail.
The school selection process for the locals of Pacific Coast High is comparably
unremarkable. This group of Pacific Coast student-athletes grew up in the affluent neighborhood
around the school and never thought twice about attending a different high school. While a
handful of the locals contemplated attending a private high school, there was no fear or hesitation
about attending Pacific Coast High. The majority of locals were White or Asian and came from
economically stable families. Unlike College Prep student-athletes, who entered high school well
aware of the school’s athletic tradition, Pacific Coast student-athletes were generally nonchalant
about their sports participation. Max, a White senior and another one of the locals, was a senior
captain for the Pacific Coast football team. Despite enjoying football and being one of the team
leaders, Max described himself as more invested in his Boy Scout participation than in high
school sports: “I have a lot of fun with football, but it’s just that like Scouts is going to take me
farther. Like on a resume it will matter more that I was an Eagle Scout than if I played football.”
The bussers and locals both anticipated a high school experience at Pacific Coast that was
“normal” and that did not heavily involve high school sports. Both groups saw Pacific Coast as a
place where they could develop and thrive in whatever way they wished. The bussers seemed
acutely aware of the school’s relative benefits, compared to their high school of residence, while
the locals seemed to take for granted that Pacific Coast mostly provided college preparatory
curricular offerings and a school environment free of violence or drugs. The bussers and their
families went to great lengths to experience the “normal” high school that the locals described.

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Park Heights High: The ones who couldn’t get out
Unlike the student-athletes from College Prep and Pacific Coast, who sometimes traveled
more than an hour each way to attend their school, all of the young men I spoke with from Park
Heights High lived in the neighborhood around the school. Park Heights is located directly
across the street from a large public housing development that respondents referred to as “the
Jex” (short for “the projects”). This housing complex was made infamous in films and hip-hop
that depict the area as dangerous and crime-ridden. Even though only a small percentage of Park
Heights students lived in the Jex, respondents felt that the area’s stigma produced much of the
school’s bad reputation. This may be due, in part, to the racial demographics of the area around
Park Heights. Quillian and Pager (2001) find a positive correlation between the percentage of
Black residents in a neighborhood and public perceptions of crime in an area. These perceptions
persisted even after the authors controlled for actual crime rates and public disorder. Thus, Park
Heights’s bad reputation and the stigma associated with the Jex might persist in spite of any
reduction of crime or improvement in school quality. Three of my respondents lived in the Jex
and several more had been there to visit friends. Park Heights student-athletes felt the same way
about the Jex as they did about their school: it is not as bad as people think it is, but it is still
pretty bad.
When discussing his school’s reputation, Lamar expressed frustration and a sense of
resignation. The senior football player had recently received athletic scholarship offers from
most Pac-12 schools, including local schools UCLA and USC. Despite being proud of the
school’s football team, Lamar openly admitted to not initially wanting to attend Park Heights
because of its reputation as a dangerous place with bad academic training. “I’ll say maybe 30%
of kids [at Park Heights] are just there to bullshit and smoke, or whatever. So they take over and
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they reflect on the whole school as a bad place. That’s why we all hear these rumors growing up,
because it’s always these people gangbanging, drinking, and smoking at school…Throwing stuff
at the teachers, bringing things like knives and guns to school.” Lamar said that there were, in
fact, students at Park Heights who were sincerely driven to do well in school and to go on to
college, but this was not what the school was known for. Lamar’s school selection process was
similar to other Park Heights student-athletes. He had grown up in the neighborhood and heard
stories about Park Heights that made him and his family unsure about going there. Respondents
told me stories about “back in the day” at Park Heights that sound exaggerated, almost
mythological in scope. Race riots at lunch time, drive-by shootings, drug deals in the bathroom,
even a machete fight. Respondents admitted that these stories are likely exaggerated, but
nonetheless harm the school’s reputation.
Reggie, a Black junior football player and sprinter on the track team, enrolled at Park
Heights by default. Some of his middle school classmates enrolled in private schools or
navigated the school transfer process to avoid going to Park Heights. But Reggie did not fight his
school placement. “I got lazy! And like, for Park Heights, like the standards are low kinda. Like
you don’t have to have good grades or nothin’ [to enroll],” Reggie explains. The high admission
standards and costly tuition of private schools derailed the high school plans for a handful of
Park Heights respondents. Tre, a Black junior sprinter on the track team, did not initially want to
go to Park Heights. “I was not finna go to Park Heights at first,” says Tre. “Because, well I was
about to go to other big schools like Canyon Christian, Bishop Murphy, and stuff like that. But
then my grades wasn’t good enough for the school. Yeah, so you had to have a certain amount of
GPA to go.” Tre met several private school coaches at summer camps and through his Pop
Warner youth football team. He was attracted to how nice these private schools were, in terms of
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their athletic facilities and uniforms, but Tre had bad middle school grades and a poor score on
his high school entrance exams. Tre was not able to attend a private high school. However, Tre
had also met two Park Heights assistant coaches at the summer football camps. When Tre knew
that private school was not an option, he reached out to these men. One of them, Coach
Whitaker, assured Tre that Park Heights was a place where he could play on varsity and
potentially get a college scholarship.
Several Park Heights student-athletes reported having a relationship with a coach prior to
their enrollment. For the majority of Park Heights student-athletes, sports participation was a
major source of their hopes and dreams entering the school. In a context of limited school
choices and stigma surrounding their school of residence, playing for the Park Heights Panthers
was one of the only things that they were excited about. The stories about violence and drugs at
Park Heights are matched, blow-for-blow, by success stories of league championships, athletic
scholarships, and professional sports careers. Marcus, a senior captain of the baseball team,
actually attended Pacific Coast High during ninth grade. “My options were pretty limited,”
Marcus remembers:
But like my mother said she'll try to get me into wherever I wanted to go. And she said Park
Heights would not be one of them!...She heard in the community about the different
perceptions about how Park Heights would be. That it would be just a bad environment for
me. A lot of gang-related stuff, you know, like criminal violence all that. But Coach Colvin, I
played with Coach Colvin before I got into high school so I already had a good relationship
with him.

In several important ways, Marcus was an outlier among Park Heights student-athletes. First, he
chose to attend Park Heights in lieu of other school options. Secondly, Marcus was carrying a 4.0
GPA at Pacific Coast when he transferred. Finally, Marcus was enrolled in the Math & Science
Magnet program, which was one of the only curricular tracks at Park Heights where respondents
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felt students received college preparatory instruction. Chapter Four will discuss the significance
of this program at Park Heights more in-depth. So why would Marcus forego an opportunity to
attend a school that his mother and many others in his community felt was better than Park
Heights? The simple answer: Coach Colvin. “I transferred to Park Heights before the season
started at Pacific Coast. Coach Colvin would call me almost every day asking me, ‘How is it
going down there?’ Because, you know, he's like a friend to me, not just a coach.” Marcus
explains that, “He kept telling me like, ‘So when am I gonna get you over here at Park Heights?’
Like, ‘I have an opening spot for you in the outfield.’ You know I'm in the infield but, as a 9th
grader I was like, sure!” Marcus was likely not going to crack the starting lineup for Pacific
Coast’s baseball team until his junior season, so transferring to Park Heights was very attractive.
In his mind, getting varsity playing time as a freshman, playing under a coach who he saw as a
friend and mentor, and staying in the community that he was raised in, outweighed the
advantages to staying at Pacific Coast High.
Reggie, who described his school selection process as “lazy,” said that he grew to love
Park Heights and does not regret his decision. “You know, there are some students [from the
neighborhood] that bus out, and a lot of people say that they want to leave, but then they end up
staying. I feel like Park Heights is like family, kind of. You know? It’s like home. I can’t
imagine myself going nowhere else where I would fit in like I was meant to go there.” Reggie
shared several of the criticisms of other Park Heights respondents, such as the small group of
disruptive students, poor teacher quality, and substandard facilities. But Reggie was adamant that
Park Heights is not nearly as bad as its reputation: “Like no place is gonna be perfect. You just
have to come here before you see the good stuff, too. And then make the most of it, I guess.”

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Conclusion
This chapter introduces three different high school sports programs in Los Angeles by
describing three of their key components: physical athletic infrastructure, coaching staff, and
backgrounds of the student-athletes. All three of these components were in place prior to my
respondents beginning their high school sports experience, and combine to create the
institutional entry point for my project. College Prep High invests a sizeable amount of its
immense institutional resources into its sports program, as it seeks to develop “the entire man” in
the tradition of Catholic education. The majority of coaches at College Prep are alumni and
purportedly come back to coach and teach at the school because of a strong belief in the school’s
mission. The school selection process for College Prep student-athletes is strikingly different
than that of Pacific Coast and Park Heights respondents. College Prep respondents largely came
from affluent families and described having a plethora of school options coming out of eighth
grade. These young men entered College Prep confident that they going to experience one of the
best academic and athletic programs in the country.
Many of these findings are not surprising, given College Prep’s high tuition and steep
academic standards. School “choice” was a luxury reserved for young men from affluent families
or who had access to knowledge of how to “opt out” of a local high school. Student-athletes at
Pacific Coast and Park Heights made their high school “choice” with significantly fewer options
than the young men from College Prep. The school’s student-athletes are among the best of the
best, and they were not afraid to say so. Alex, a White senior soccer player, told me that there is
a plaque at the entrance to the College Prep locker room that reads: “Through these halls pass the
finest athletes in the country.” According to Alex, it was customary for student-athletes to touch
this plaque on their way to practice or competition. More surprising than the differences between
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College Prep students and the other young men I spoke with, was the difference between the two
public schools in my sample: Pacific Coast High and Park Heights High.
Pacific Coast High’s sports program was decidedly peripheral to the school’s overall
mission. Despite having a lovely brick school building and well-manicured campus, the school’s
sports facilities were over-crowded and run-down. The school also struggled to find faculty
members willing to volunteer to coach the school’s teams, so the vast majority of Pacific Coast’s
coaches were “walk-on” coaches with little or no ties to the school. The teachers at Pacific Coast
who did volunteer to coach have a disproportionate amount of work to do with little material or
institutional support. Teacher-coaches like Coach Reynolds, who coaches the cross-country and
track/field teams, train large numbers of players on sub-standard fields and sports facilities.
There were indications that the school was starting to invest more in its sports program, however.
At the time of this project’s data collection, Pacific Coast was finishing construction on a hard-
fought, long-awaited football stadium that was set to house soccer, track/field, and football
practices and games. There were two distinct groups of student-athletes at Pacific Coast: the
locals and the bussers. The locals lived in the affluent neighborhood around the school and came
to the school with expectations of a normal high school experience. They felt like the school was
“pretty good” academically, but nothing special in terms of sports. The bussers, on the other
hand, traveled great distances and often went to considerable lengths to attend Pacific Coast.
Many of these young men and their families felt that their “school of residence” was a dangerous
or undesirable place to go to high school. Thus, they found ways to attend Pacific Coast High.
Some of the bussers came to the school because their parents worked near the school and it was
easy to commute, while others came because of a past relationship with a coach at the school.
Moreso than its sports program, the bussers were drawn to Pacific Coast’s non-sport
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extracurricular offerings, the diversity of the student body, and the quality of the school’s
academic programs.
The stakes of sports participation seem the highest at Park Heights, my project’s third
school. Park Heights and Pacific Coast both had poor quality sports facilities. However, unlike at
Pacific Coast, the sports facilities at Park Heights reflect the state of the school more generally.
Park Heights is struggling to shake the stigma associated with its surrounding neighborhood, as
well as the label of an “under-performing” high school. The coaching staff at Park Heights was
also starkly different than that at Pacific Coast. Nearly all of the coaches at Park Heights were
teachers and had been at the school for upwards of ten years. A handful of these teacher-coaches
were also Park Heights alumni. These men spoke passionately about using sports as a way to
uplift a school that they saw as in decline. Nearly every young man from Park Heights lived in
the area around the school and grew up hearing stories about violence, drugs, and academic
failure at Park Heights. They also grew up watching Park Heights Panther football and basketball
games and could all recite a list of players who had gone on to play in college or professionally.
Thus, these young men generally came to Park Heights expecting to receive poor academic
training, but to have a real chance at a college athletic scholarship. Respondents regularly told
me something to the effect of, “it’s not as bad as everyone thinks it is, here,” but still admitted
that the school had serious problems that make it difficult to excel academically.
Taking as its starting point that each school’s sports program is unique, the next chapter
examines the thoughts and experiences of male student-athletes across these schools. Through
the worldviews and stories of male student-athletes, Chapter Four explores how each school’s
sports program relates to its formal curriculum, social life, and disciplinary structures. In what
ways does “student-athlete identity” differ for young men at College Prep, Pacific Coast, and
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Park Heights? Do the differences in each school’s sports program result in different student-
athlete experiences as young men interact with and navigate the non-sports structures of their
high school? Does a school’s sports program contribute to or detract from its opportunity
structure?

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CHAPTER 4
ATHLETIC ECOLOGY: HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS AND THE ACADEMIC, SOCIAL, AND
DISCIPLINARY EXPERIENCES OF YOUNG MEN
Each of the 60 young men that I spoke with worked consciously with their available
resources to craft and publicly present a dignified “self” to people whose opinions they valued.
Sources of validation included parents, brothers, teachers and counselors, teammates, friends,
girls, coaches, college scouts, and college admissions officers. The source of validation differed
for young men both across and within schools. This is not to say that respondents strove to be
perfect in all facets of their high school lives. Some were openly critical of themselves as
students, described themselves as “loners” and “class clowns,” or joked about how bad they were
at sports. Despite occasional self-deprecation, each student-athlete wanted to be seen by others –
possibly including me – as worthwhile and important in some way. As Derek, a member of the
freshman football team at Park Heights succinctly explains, “Nobody wants to be a nobody.” The
availability of opportunities and resources at each school shaped the kinds of identities that male
student-athletes enacted. This chapter explores the various student-athletes identities at College
Prep High, Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights High. I analyze survey and interview data to
illuminate the experiences and worldviews of male student-athletes regarding three structures of
their high school: the formal curriculum, student social life, and disciplinary systems.
Past research finds that teachers, peers, school administrators, and discipline policies
create and enforce the boundaries of student social categories (Coleman 1961; Willis 1981;
Eckert 1989; Nolan 2011; Bettie 2014). Student attitudes and actions shape their social category
affiliation. Sometimes category membership is self-elected, while other times it is externally
imposed by peers or school-based adults. In the simplest of terms, this body of research describes
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the experiences of two groups of students: privileged students and marginalized students. The
rewards and punishments associated with these school-based social categories often work to the
disadvantage of low-income students, as well as Black and Latino men (Valenzuela 1999;
Ferguson 2000; Lopez 2002; Carter 2005; Morris 2012). Students of color, students from low-
income families, and students who attend poorly resourced schools have fewer opportunities to
earn membership in more desirable school-based social categories (Morris 2005).
To this point, the relationship between high school sports participation and social
category
15
membership for young men remains unclear. In some studies, male student-athletes
are well-regarded, high-achieving students who are among the most popular students at their
school (Coleman 1961). Yet other researchers find that male student-athletes are more likely to
be aggressive, risky, and anti-intellectual (Miller et al. 2006; Kreager 2007; Hartmann and
Massoglia 2007; Miller et al. 2007). While these are not mutually exclusive findings, the school-
level forces that shape student-athlete behavior and social status remain underexplored. The
prominence of single-school case studies and broad national surveys has left some important
questions unanswered about how school context impacts the high school sports experience.
My interview data suggest that a school’s formal curriculum, social life, and disciplinary
system interact with its sports program to create school contexts where young men construct
particular student-athlete identities. The thoughts and experiences of my respondents provide
insight into how young men creatively and intentionally enact student-athlete identities within
school contexts of both privilege and scarcity. Respondents’ self-described motivations for

15
Following Eckert’s (1989) approach, I use the term “category,” rather than “group” to underscore the symbolic
nature of the meanings attached to behavior in particular school contexts. Often students do “group” together with
others who fall into their respective “category.” However, this was not always the case. The term “category” is thus
more reflective of the roll that activity-based groupings played at each school.
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playing sports, beliefs about their own strengths/abilities, and views of their school’s quality
reveal five different kinds of student-athlete identities: the “scholar-athlete,” the “Division-1 (D-
1) athlete,” the “rowdy jock,” the “benchwarmer,” and the “school captain.” These five ideal
types of student-athlete identities are fluid, permeable, and largely shaped by how young men
perceive and experience opportunity structures in their high school.
I conceptualize these categories as recipes whose ingredients consist of the beliefs and
actions of student-athletes in both athletic and non-athletic structures of their school. To be sure,
the potential to enact each of these categories exists at all three high schools, but the ingredients
to achieve particular student-athlete identities are not equally available or desirable to young
men. Nasir (2011) argues that ideational, material, and relational resources combine to shape the
kind of identity that students enact. As Chapter Three demonstrated, male student-athletes at
College Prep, Pacific Coast, and Park Heights come to high school with unique intersectional
identities that accompany family-based resources. These racialized, gendered, and class-based
identities inform their school choice process and hugely shape their transition from middle
school to high school for young men. I also showed in Chapter Three that structural and cultural
processes shape each school’s sports program and the role that student-athletes expect sports to
play in their high school careers. Similar forces shape the availability and desirability of student-
athlete identities across these schools.
Young men enact student-athlete identities with the belief that they come with a set of
rewards and sanctions from teachers, peers, and disciplinary agents. Male student-athletes
describe their choices and actions on the field, in the classroom, on the weekend with their
friends, and in the hallways as attempts to either claim or avoid categorization into particular
social categories at their school. For example, the “nobody” group that Derek discussed in the
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above quote was a social category at Park Heights. A “nobody” at Park Heights resembles a
social category that other school ethnographers have described
16
. By playing sports, Derek and
other Park Heights student-athletes felt like they were distancing themselves from a group of
students that they saw as “not about shit” (i.e. unmotivated and not possessing any desirable
attributes). The experiences and worldviews of the young men in my sample suggest that
student-athlete identity categories shape and are shaped by each school’s academic curriculum,
social life, and punitive processes. I will show that access to certain types of student-athlete
identity was uneven across schools in my sample. Student-athletes at College Prep were more
easily able to claim academically oriented student-athlete identities, while student-athletes at
Park Heights were consigned to more limited forms of student-athlete identity.
By highlighting the variety of identities that student-athletes adopt, and how these
identities relate to school context, I show the complex ways that high school sports fits into the
high school lives of young men. Some student-athlete identities are based on academic success,
and successful performance of these identities is accompanied by rewards from teachers and
peers. However, the absence of identity resources and opportunity structures at schools like Park
Heights High makes an academically oriented student-athlete identity difficult to attain and
perform for young men. Eccles and Barber (1999) argue that a synergistic relationship exists
between student activity, peer group formation, and how a student sees himself. In other words,
students make activity choices based on how they see themselves and then develop peer

16
Morris (2012) describes a “lame” (p. 29) as a young man who is unknown at school, who does not embody
hegemonic masculinity, or who does not excel in any particular aspect of school. Eckert (1989) describes “burnouts”
in similar fashion, but with less gender specificity. A burnout is a student who rejects school norms or teacher
expectations. The burnout performance (or rejection) played an important role in class reproduction among the
students in Eckert’s study (p. 102).
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networks in the course of activity participation that reinforce their self-identity (Eccles and
Barber 199, p. 32). This model, however, treats activities such as school-based sports as discrete
school contexts and ignores how school-level structures can shape these spaces. I will show that
student-athlete identity, and the broader high school sports experience, is mediated by their
experiences with and views of non-athletic structures of high school.
I refer to the relationship between a school’s sports program and other non-sports
structures as the school’s “athletic ecology.” Borrowing from for Bronfenbrenner’s (1979)
concept of “the ecology of human development,” I use the term athletic ecology to emphasize
that multiple, overlapping school structures shape how and for whom high school sports
participation matters. I see high school sports as a puzzle piece that fits differently into each
school, alongside other school structures. However, unlike a traditional puzzle, these school
structures overlap rather than interlock and remain separate. Bronfenbrenner introduced his
concept as a corrective to theories of human development that he felt ignored the importance of
multiple, simultaneously salient contexts. He argues that developmental psychologists often treat
context and environment as static structures, and thus ignore the interaction between and across
contexts. Similarly, I argue that a school’s athletic ecology shapes the meaning making process
and eventual impacts of sports participation for student-athletes. Understanding how and for
whom sports participation matters requires a thorough accounting of how a sports program fits
into the broader school context. I use each school’s sports program as a point of entry to explore
how academic, social, and disciplinary experiences shape student-athlete identity for young men.
Data from male student-athletes describe the athletic ecology at College Prep, Pacific Coast, and
Park Heights. These athletic ecologies combine with young men’s pre-high school resources and
identities to create student-athlete identities.
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This chapter emphasizes the different ways that sports are structured across high schools
and how opportunity and resources are made available – or not – to male student-athletes. The
relationship between sports and other aspects of a high school structures how student-athletes,
teachers, parents, and peers view sports participation. As my data will demonstrate, the male
high school student-athlete experience differs dramatically across school context, family
background, and sports type. Past research has shown that men, across race and class, invest in
sports participation for unique reasons. Messner (1992) concludes that:
…within a social context stratified by class and by race [sports], the choice to pursue - or not
to pursue - an athletic career is determined by the individual's rational assessment of the
available means to construct a respected masculine identity. White middle-class men were
likely to reject athletic careers and shift their masculine strivings to education and nonsport
careers. Conversely, men from poor and blue-collar backgrounds, especially blacks, often
perceived athletic careers to be their best chance for success in the public sphere. (p. 153)

A school’s athletic ecology plays an important role in shaping individual student-athlete
perceptions of their school’s opportunities and resources. Thus, the performance of some
student-athlete identities includes a staunch dedication to academic achievement, while others
stress athletic performance or being popular among peers. Along with race and class background,
I argue that school-specific structures shape a young man’s student-athlete identity.
The following three sections describe how male student-athletes at College Prep, Pacific
Coast High, and Park Heights High think about and navigate the academic curriculum, social
life, and punitive disciplinary systems of their respective school. Even though I discuss these
school structures in discrete sections, and emphasize how each school structure overlaps with the
school’s sports program, there is clear evidence that all of these school structures are mutually
constitutive. For example, a student-athlete who is able to access his school’s AP track is more
likely to be seen by teachers and peers as a “good student” and thus remain exempt from close
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behavioral scrutiny by security guards and teachers. Another student, who is in the special
education track at his school, is likewise more likely to be given detention or removed from class
because of his behavior. This student is also stigmatized among his peers and is more likely to
have friends who skip class, use drugs and feel estranged from school. The stories from my
respondents suggest that these two young men can sometimes attend the same schools and even
be teammates. Thus, because these two young men experience very different challenges and
identities at school, playing high school sports plays a very different role in their lives. After
describing male student-athlete experiences with their school’s academic curriculum, social life,
and disciplinary systems, I further develop my term “athletic ecology” and conclude with ways
that a school’s athletic ecology can be toxic to and beneficial for student-athlete outcomes.

Playbooks and Textbooks
The academic outcomes of high school sports participation are well documented in past
literature. We know, for example, that student-athletes earn better grades, graduate at higher
rates, and pursue postsecondary education more often than non-athlete peers (Marsh 1992;
Marsh and Kleitman 2002; Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004). However, several studies
have also shown that academic benefits are not uniform across groups of student-athletes
(Melnick, Sabo, and Vanfossen 1992; Sabo, Melnick, and Vanfossen 1993; Eitle and Eitle 2002;
Zeiser 2011). Sabo, Melnick and Vanfossen (1993) find that the educational attainment of White
males and females benefits from sports participation, while Black males and females receive
little return. Similarly, Eitle and Eitle (2002) find White student-athletes receive a larger boost to
their grade point averages, than Black student-athletes. Most of these nuances are at the
individual level of the student-athlete and compare student-athletes to non-sports participants. I
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add to this literature by comparing the male student-athlete experience across school context.
Further, I present interview data that explains how race mediates academic performance for
student-athletes. Respondents described vastly different academic opportunity structures at
College Prep, Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights High.
College Prep students have access to a wide array of honors and AP courses that are
taught by passionate teachers and are held in computer labs or state-of-the-art science labs. The
students at Park Heights, however, felt like their chances for academic success in high school
and after high school were largely out of their hands because only one academic track was seen
as preparing students for college. The Park Heights students lucky enough to earn entry into the
Math & Science Magnet program felt as though they received a college preparatory education
and had regular access to quality academic resources such as computers and new textbooks. Park
Heights respondents felt that, in general, student-athletes were more likely to be in the Math &
Science magnet. However, student-athletes in the “regular” track or the special education track
felt that their teachers were inept, overwhelmed by student misbehavior, and unable or unwilling
to provide a quality education. These young men described cramped, uncomfortable classrooms
and sometimes did not have basic supplies like desks or books.
By contrast, the student-athletes at Pacific Coast High described an academic
environment that was fair to students and had opportunities for those that worked for it. These
young men felt that the teachers and counselors at Pacific Coast were often passionate and
accessible, which allowed motivated students to succeed. The evaluation of the school’s
academic quality also varied according to “the locals” and “the bussers.” The locals were
lukewarm about the school’s reputation, while the bussers felt the school did a good job of
preparing them for college. Further, student-athletes at Pacific Coast described two very different
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academic tracks: the regulars and the AP tracks. According to Pacific Coast respondents, “the
“regulars” at Pacific Coast (i.e. the non-honors and non-AP courses) tended to be disruptive to
learning and full of unmotivated students, some of whom were student-athletes that cared more
about playing sports than doing well in school.
The next section uses survey data to describe the academic experiences of respondents at
College Prep, Pacific Coast, and Park Heights. Measures include academic performance,
educational aspirations, and the extent to which respondents identified as students or as athletes.
Subsequent sections use interview data to describe how student-athletes view and experience the
academic opportunity structure at each high school.

Student-Athlete Identity and Academic Performance across Schools
The initial survey that I administered to all student-athletes included a question about
student-athlete identity. The question read: “You are both a student AND an athlete at your high
school. But, on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being “TOTALLY A STUDENT” and 10 being
“TOTALLY AN ATHLETE,” how would you identify yourself?” This question is one way for
young men to describe the extent to which they identify with and invest in sports, school, or
both. I explored this question further in my follow-up interviews.
In our conversations, student-athletes from College Prep described themselves first and
foremost as students. As I discussed in Chapter Three, young men at Prep proudly touted their
school as a place that fosters excellence in all facets of high school life. They disparaged other
private high schools, which they felt offered inferior academic training and focused excessively
on sports. The College Prep ethos of being “more than just a jock” was evident in their
descriptions of themselves as students. Regardless of athletic ability, family background, or type
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of sport, College Prep student-athletes said that their grades were their top priority. However, the
survey data does not necessarily support their claims. While College Prep respondents, on
average, were the most “student” identified school, their mean score, 5.39 (see Table 4.1 below),
is still slightly tipped toward the “athlete” side of the scale. In other words, even the most school-
oriented school in my sample identified more as athletes than as students. This may be
attributable to the fact that they were surveyed either before, during, or after a practice when they
were surrounded by their teammates. However, the fact remains that athlete identity was highly
salient for respondents. Among all sports teams at College Prep, the cross country team had the
most “student” aligned average score (5.05), while the basketball team reported the most
“athlete” aligned score (6.44). College Prep respondents were also far and away the most likely
to expect to obtain at least a four-year college degree. Nearly all Prep student-athletes (92%)
expected to achieve a Bachelor’s degree or graduate degree, compared to 74% of Pacific Coast
respondents and 67% of Park Heights student-athletes. Finally, nearly every team at College
Prep reported a higher average grade point average than the teams from Park Heights and Pacific
Coast
17
. As a whole, Prep respondents had an average GPA of 3.74.
The interview data suggests that athletic talent did not seem to produce more “athlete”
identification among College Prep respondents. Andre was a senior captain and pre-season All-
American defensive back. During our interview he kept emphasizing the need to prepare for “life
after ball.” When asked about his plans for after high school, Andre ran down about a dozen
schools that had offered him athletic scholarships before explaining how he’s thinking about his
options:

17
The lone exception is Pacific Coast High’s cross-country team, which had an average GPA of 3.69.
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About 100% of my choices are motivated by me being a student because I know I'm alright
at football but, I mean, I don't think that's really going to help me even if, I don't know, if I
were to go first round and then break my leg or something, God forbid. I have to fall back on
my education so... that's something I kind of really use football to help me get my education
because elsewhere you'll now have to pay to go to school so that I can utilize football as a
tool for you know, being able to pay for me to go to school. That's why I'm really trying to
take advantage of somewhere like Stanford where they do something like a co-term program.
I'm interested in something like that because I'm really taking advantage of them giving me
scholarships.

Andre mentioned NFL quarterback Andrew Luck, a Stanford alum, as an example of someone
he’s trying to emulate. While at Stanford, Luck earned a four-year degree in their architecture
program and still excelled on the field. Mark, a seven-foot center on Prep’s basketball team, also
emphasized the importance of academics over athletics. Mark had recently accepted an academic
scholarship to an Ivy League school, in lieu of athletic scholarships from major Pac-12 programs
such as UCLA, USC, and Arizona. “I just think that my mind is going to last a lot longer than
my body! I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m going to do my best to play in the NBA or over in
Europe…but if that doesn’t work out, I need to have a back-up plan in place.”
A handful of College Prep respondents identified more as an athlete than a student
because of the amount of time they spend on sports participation. George, a White junior hurdler
on the Prep track team, takes several AP and honors courses and plans to attend a four-year
college on an academic scholarship. However, George still rated himself as an “8” on the
student-athlete identity measure. When asked why this was, George explained that because he
spends so much time training for track he feels more like an athlete than a student during track
season. “You know, you’re getting home really late each night after practice or after a meet and
just don’t have a lot of time for other stuff. It [track-related activity] kind of takes over your life.”
If I had surveyed young men when they were not in season or if they were not in practice, it is
possible that they would have answered the question differently.
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The school-first identity among College Prep student-athletes was not evident among all
student-athletes at Pacific Coast High. The most “athlete” identified team at Pacific Coast was
the football team, where the mean student-athlete score was 6.71. Among all student-athletes at
Pacific Coast, football players appear to be the least academically oriented. On average they had
the lowest GPA (2.92), took the fewest number of AP or honors classes each year (1.13 classes
per year), and had the highest average student-athlete identity score. Other Pacific Coast student-
athletes described the football players as typically poor students and disruptive in class. Calvin,
an Asian/Pacific Islander (API) junior on the basketball team, said that Pacific Coast football
players were frequently academically ineligible. “There’s always like a few kids, like they focus
on football or they don’t care about their homework so they just fall behind and then, when the
time comes, they’re off the team.” Calvin explains why he thinks this trend occurs: “I think that
some kids are more dedicated to their sport rather than their academics…Like me personally, I
put academics first, then sports. But some people put sports ahead ‘cause they believe that’s their
ticket to fame or that’s their ticket to college or to a scholarship.” Despite having a significantly
lower average GPA than College Prep respondents, student-athletes from Pacific Coast actually
took more honors and AP courses each year, on average. This trend appears largely driven by
Pacific Coast High’s cross country and track team
18
. Members of these two teams, on average,
took more than two honors or AP courses each year.
While the survey data shows some within-school variation of academic performance, the
between-school differences are far more pronounced. Park Heights respondents identified more

18
Because both cross country and track are no-cut sports, held in different seasons, and coached by the same person,
there is a lot of overlap in participants.
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strongly as an “athlete” than those from College Prep or Pacific Coast. On average, Park Heights
respondents had a student-athlete identity score of 6.18. Athletic identity was most pronounced
among basketball players at Park Heights, where respondents averaged a score of 7.04. Across
all three high schools, the most “athlete” identified team – the basketball team at College Prep,
the football team at Pacific Coast, and basketball at Park Heights – also had the lowest grade
point averages at their respective schools. Park Heights student-athletes do not seem to be doing
well academically. Compared to respondents from College Prep and Pacific Coast, these young
men report the lowest GPA, the least expectation of obtaining a four-year college degree, and the
fewest average number of AP or honors courses taken.
The survey data suggest that an “athlete” identification is correlated with poor academic
performance. However, my interviews with young men show that a high school’s academic
opportunity structure prefigures a young man’s level of investment in an “athlete” identity. The
following sections use the thoughts and stories of student-athletes to emphasize the importance
of school context and perceived academic opportunity structures in shaping student-athlete
academic performance. Student-athletes’ academic performance is shaped by how they perceive
opportunity at their school and the kinds of resources at their disposal. When young men attend
high schools with relatively little chance to succeed in school or attend college, and thus adopt an
“athlete” identity, sports become a compensatory identity resource that allows them to develop
and display competence.

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Table 4.1 Descriptive Statistics of Academic Performance by School & Six Most Popular
Sports (N = 534)

College Prep
High

Pacific Coast
High

Park Heights
High
Mean "student-athlete identity": 1-10 scale
1="total student"; 10="total athlete"
5.39 (1.67), N=270 5.98 (1.90), N=174 6.18 (1.96), N=85
Track and Field
5.29 (1.67), N=98 5.88 (1.90), N=30 6.23 (2.06), N=53
Football
5.88 (1.68), N=66 6.71 (1.81), N=45 6.26 (2.11), N=66
X-Country
5.05 (1.55), N=56 5.92 (2.18), N=39 6.08 (1.56), N=12
Baseball
6.13 (1.64), N=52 6.14 (1.66), N=35 5.89 (1.59), N=19
Soccer
5.39 (1.44), N=61 6.47 (1.78), N=35 --
Basketball
6.44 (1.01), N= 9 5.51 (1.92), N=49 7.04 (1.91), N=12

% who expect at least a 4-year college degree 92% 74% 67%
Track and Field 95% 83% 73%
Football 91% 71% 65%
X-Country 95% 82% 83%
Baseball 90% 77% 79%
Soccer 87% 51% --
Basketball 80% 86% 67%

Mean grade point average 3.74 (.43) 3.19 (.63) 2.89 (.47)
Track and Field 3.72 (.45) 3.50 (.50) 2.86 (.46)
Football 3.61 (.40) 2.92 (.63) 2.83 (.44)
X-Country 3.78 (.39) 3.69 (.41) 3.15 (.54)
Baseball 3.63 (.40) 3.16 (.57) 3.11 (.41)
Soccer 3.75 (.31) 3.08 (.78) --
Basketball 3.60 (.44) 3.15 (.60) 2.75 (.52)

Mean # of Honors/AP courses taken per year 1.23 (1.06) 1.91 (1.87) .39 (.49)
Track and Field 1.31 (1.80) 2.18 (1.79) .32 (.42)
Football .91 (.84) 1.13 (1.72) .37 (.48)
X-Country 1.35 (1.27) 2.84 (1.90) .35 (.40)
Baseball .89 (.92) 1.91 (1.83) .56 (.55)
Soccer 1.05 (.91) 1.69 (1.66) --
Basketball .78 (1.25) 1.71 (1.87) .62 (.46)

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College Prep: All paths lead to college
At College prep, students have the option to invest in an athletic and in an academic
identity. Some young men at Prep proudly described being deeply committed to improving
themselves as athletes, to winning as many championships as possible, and to even playing
sports at the college level. However, this student-athlete performance was done within a school
context of immense resources and myriad options for alternative sources of student
empowerment and development. College Prep’s academic environment is created and bolstered
by the affluent backgrounds of many of the school’s students and the selective application
process that students pass through. Cody and Sean, two senior baseball players who were both
headed to East Coast colleges to play baseball, describe the school-first ethos among College
Prep student-athletes:
Sean: Yeah, I’d say I mean you’re at Prep for a reason. It’s to excel academically first and
then athletically. So I think academics takes the precedent over athletics and that’s pretty
much it.

Cody: Kids really have…like you can talk to the majority of kids [at College Prep] and they
know what they want to do in life, which is so unique. I mean like at just seventeen or
eighteen years old! Yeah, they [College Prep] prepare you so well that like kids already know
they’re going to be pre-med or they want to be an orthopedic surgeon or they want to be a
lawyer, you know all this stuff…

Sean: They already know!

Cody: ‘Cause that’s they weren’t groomed by their parents or in a boarding school! Because
they were at Prep, they found out what they want to do earlier than most kids and it’s gonna
to make it easier to transition from high school to college.

Cody and Sean’s description was borne out in my conversations with College Prep respondents
and is reflected in the number of student-athletes at Prep expect to earn at least a four-year
college degree. When asked about their plans for life after high school, every single Prep
respondent clearly articulated a set of elite college or universities that they believed fit with their
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anticipated career path. Jake, Prep’s quarterback, had received college football recruitment letters
from several schools. However, he was most excited when Boston College expressed interest in
him. Jake explains, “The biggest one [recruitment letter] for me overall was Boston College…I'd
love to play football for B.C. Like they have the fourth-best business school at the country and
like that’s something I wanna pursue I think.” Similar to Andre, who was leaning toward
Stanford University because of their renowned architecture program, Jake is making his college
sports plans with his academic interests and future in mind. College Prep student-athletes are
surrounded by teammates and non-athlete peers who are driven to perform well in school. The
culture of academic achievement and the availability of resources that support learning at Prep
gives its student-athletes the option of adopting a “scholar-athlete” identity more easily than at
Pacific Coast or Park Heights.
Part of Prep’s culture of academic achievement involved enrolling in as many AP and
honors courses as possible. Several times, while surveying College Prep teams, I observed light-
hearted arguments among teammates about who had taken more AP courses. Indeed, College
Prep student-athletes felt like taking AP and honors courses were always an option for them.
Dominic, a junior baseball player and student body president, explains his motivation to take
several high-level courses:
So I really wanted to take AP physics and calculus because I wanna be an engineer in
college. And then I wanted to take AP economics because I heard it was a fun class. A fun
AP and I get to learn like real-world applications…So I wanted to take AP government and
my teacher didn’t want to give me a recommendation for that class…He was skeptical of me
taking the 4 APs but he was like, “You know what? If you wanna take it, take them, but just
know you don’t have to. You don’t have to sleep if you don’t want to!” I think that was like
the best advice that a counselor has given me. Just the fact that I have the power to do what I
want with my schedule.

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Student-athletes at Prep believe that anybody can take advanced courses if they have enough will
and the knowledge of how to “work the system” by appealing to teachers and guidance
counselors. Thus, these young men see students who do not take AP or honors courses as
unwilling to put in the hard work to better themselves.
Student-athletes frequently meet with their guidance counselors, whom they describe
with words like “awesome,” “friendly,” and “knowledgeable.” This advising is built into the
curriculum at Prep and students sit with their counselors each semester to plan their classes for
the upcoming academic term. According to respondents, there are 8 counselors that serve the
school’s 1,270 students. College preparation begins early for students, regardless of a student’s
year in school or academic track. A junior cross-country runner, Elwin, said that he joined the
team at the suggestion of his college counselor. “My counselor said to start running ‘cause my
grades weren’t, well…I mean my cumulative was like at a 3.0 after my freshman year. So it was
not good. She’s like, ‘You need to do something! ‘Cause I was only in one club, the Association
of Latin American Students [ALAS], so she suggested running. And it turns out I was pretty
good at it.” At the time of our interview, Elwin had been elected to serve as one of the cross-
country team captains for his senior season. When I asked him he thought his counselor
suggested he run, Elwin replied, “Uh, ‘cause well College Prep is all about getting you to
college. So I guess she thought it would help.” One of Elwin’s teammates, Luke, described the
counseling at College Prep as going above and beyond helping you get into college:
They really care about you, they care about how you are in school. I’ve talked to friends from
other schools and they say, “Oh yea, my counselor he’s okay, doesn’t really talk to me that
much.” But with these counselors, they make time for you if you need to talk to them they
are there. A really cool thing that my counselor does is uh if you’re ever tired she lets you
come into her office and just sleep for like during lunch and you can just talk to them about
anything and it’s all confidential.

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According to Prep’s student-athletes, the school’s counselors provide holistic assistance that
allows them to deal with day-to-day stress, as well as plan for long-term academic success. The
counseling services were one of several key components of the academic opportunity structure at
College Prep.

Pacific Coast: The “regulars” and the “smart classes”
According to male student-athletes at Pacific Coast High, the school is as close to a
“normal” Los Angeles high school as possible: not especially great, not especially bad. When
asked to describe Pacific Coast’s academic reputation, Devon replied, “It’s just kinda there…It’s
just, in general, the school that you go to. It’s just one of those that you send your kid to and
don’t really have to think about it.” Devon is a junior on the baseball team, plays outfield, and
lives in the affluent West L.A. neighborhood around Pacific Coast. As discussed in Chapter
Three, Devon is one of “the locals” at Pacific Coast High. Devon’s description of the school, and
the kinds of intention and expectations that parents and students have coming in, diverges from
the description of ‘the bussers” who come to the school through concerted effort in order to
avoid their high school of residence. The bussers generally described the school in more
optimistic and appreciative ways. One of the bussers, Osvaldo plays on the soccer team, and
takes a Metro bus from South LA to get to and from Pacific Coast High each day. He feels like
Pacific Coast has a great academic reputation, compared to other schools in the area. “I think we
have a really good academic reputation in the area…I mean, Pacific Coast is like a school where
people want to go to get good grades. It’s just, I don’t really know how to explain it. ‘Cause like
every school has something that they’re good at. We’re known to be more good with grades and
school, I think.”
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In addition to the different evaluation of the locals and the bussers, student-athletes at
Pacific Coast stressed that academic opportunity at the school depended on how hard you were
willing to work and which academic track you were in. Respondents used the term “the regulars”
to refer to classes at Pacific Coast that were not honors or AP classes. David, a senior captain on
the baseball team, describes his impression of the regulars: “I’ve pretty much only taken AP or
honors classes. They’re mostly well-behaved classes. I would hear about regular classes,
though…Just being real loud and messing with the teacher. Just students talking back and
walking around in the classroom.” Several other students who were in the advanced track
courses echoed this sentiment. Mitchel is a sophomore on the basketball team and only takes AP
and honors classes at Pacific Coast. “I feel like there are almost two separate schools at Pacific
Coast,” Mitchel says. “The students are like…’cause in the regulars, they have the reputation for
just out of control fights. But you go to an AP class [laughs] it’s like a college class. In my AP
classes we sit down, we take our computers out, and we get to work.” Mitchel and David are
both White student-athletes and are both locals. Each of them also almost exclusively take upper-
track courses and disparage the regular classes as unruly classroom environments that are hard to
learn in. Mitchel later qualified his impression of the regulars: “I mean there are some kids in
there that really want to learn. And a lot of them are on the [Pacific Coast basketball] team. It’s
just…it’s hard to learn when your teacher is having to babysit the other kids.” Student-athletes at
Pacific Coast High, especially the locals who take AP/honors courses, spoke of academic
opportunity in meritocratic terms. In their estimation, they are in college prep tracks because they
choose to and work hard enough to deserve this opportunity. Conversely, they see students in the
regulars as troublemakers who choose to not work hard in their schoolwork. The relationship
between meritocracy and academic opportunity at Pacific Coast is challenged when the social
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distance between the locals and the bussers is disrupted through playing sports together. Student-
athletes in the honors/AP classes were more likely to view a teammate enrolled in the regulars as
an exception to the “you get what you deserve” rhetoric. Later in this chapter, the impact of
sports participation on social life will be discussed in greater detail.
Francis is an API senior basketball player who only takes AP/honors class. He doesn’t
see race as a factor in who gets to take college prep classes and who takes the regulars. “No,
there’s Latinos, Blacks, there’s everybody in class. It’s just those kids would wanna get smarter
and they want to put in the work to go to a four-year university.” However, Francis conceded
that it may be more than just internal drive or motivation that leads to student academic success
at Pacific Coast: “I think parents are important too. ‘Cause sometimes parents want their kids to
go to an honors or AP course ‘cause they believe that’s the way to get into a four-year
college…really if you want to take a hard class, you can. You just need your parents to sign off
on it and you’ll be let in.” Francis had friends in his classes whose parents forced them to take
AP/honors courses when they didn’t want to or weren’t academically prepared. He felt like it
would be better for these students to be in the regulars and get a higher GPA, rather than
languish in the more rigorous courses.
The bifurcation of academic tracks (the regulars and AP/honors) and neighborhood of
residence (the bussers and the locals) was reflected in the within-school differences across sports
teams at Pacific Coast High. Interview data suggests that, with few exceptions, certain types of
students played certain sports at Pacific Coast. The locals, who are mostly White or API and
from affluent families, are more likely to be on the cross-country and track team. Similarly, the
bussers, who are mostly Black and Latino, are more likely to play football, baseball, and soccer.
The academic reputations of Pacific Coast High’s sports teams seems to align with the racial
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demographics and academic track enrollment of its teams. For example, respondents referred to
the cross-country team as “the smart kid sport,” while they described the football and soccer
teams as the “class clowns” or the teams the “think they’re better than everybody.” Unlike at
College Prep High, where student-athletes across all sports felt like they could excel
academically and performed a “scholar-athlete” identity, Pacific Coast’s student-athletes appear
to adopt an identity based on the academic track they enroll in. The belief among student-athletes
that students in the regulars did not work hard or care about their schoolwork reinforced a sense
of fairness or meritocracy in relation to academic opportunity at Pacific Coast High. His belief
was not present among student-athletes at Park Heights High, where student-athletes felt the
whole system of academic opportunity was rigged from the outset.

Park Heights: The wrong side of the academic track
Student-athletes at Park Heights High consistently described feeling frustrated or
underserved by the school’s academic training. Lamar, a senior on the Park Heights football
team, said the quality of teachers badly needs to improve. When asked why this was, Lamar
recounted his experience in his sophomore biology class:
For second semester, our teacher was just gone. So he’s missing, they already excused him
and everything, and we had four subs to take his place. Not one sub. We had four subs!...And
the last sub was kind of a weirdo a little bit. Like weird as in, while we’re trying to learn,
he’s showing us videos of him doing ambidextrous tennis, ambidextrous activities, throwing
a Frisbee and catching it with the other hand, throwing it and catching it with the same hand.
Just showing us that for like 45 minutes. And then he might show us something about
biology, but yeah he we wouldn’t like him so students started throwing stuff at him. But he
never figured out who it was, so like he called security but nobody is gonna snitch, so he fails
half the class. So we just got dealt that hand. So that’s what I think we need to change.

Lamar’s experience was not unusual at Park Heights. Tre, a junior football player, recounted a
similar story when describing his frustration with the quality of education at Park Heights. When
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asked to describe Park Heights’s academic training, Tre told a story of his freshman Spanish
teacher, who lost one of his major class projects and eventually gave him a “D” because she
counted the assignment as missing. At the time of the interview, Tre was re-taking Spanish in
summer school to improve his grade. As will be discussed later in this chapter, student
misbehavior and the ways that teachers mete out discipline in the classroom seriously detract
from the academic training that students receive at Park Heights. Several student-athletes
expressed sympathy for teachers who have to manage classroom disruptions, but still concluded
that they were not good teachers in the first place. The barriers to academic opportunity at Park
Heights are more systemic than the “bad apple” teachers that Tre and Lamar described. Tre and
Lamar, like the majority of students at Park Heights, were in the “regular” academic track.
However, a few of the young men I spoke with were enrolled in the highly desirable Math &
Science Magnet program at Park Heights.
Park Heights’s Math & Science magnet program began in the early 2000’s. This magnet
program serves roughly 250 students (about 20% of the student body) and is housed in the
newest academic building on campus. Park Heights student-athletes believe that the Math &
Science magnet is the only academic track at the school where students consistently receive
college preparatory training. Cedric was one of four Park Heights student-athletes I spoke with
who was enrolled in the Math & Science magnet. A sophomore on the baseball team, Cedric
feels like the students in the Math & Science magnet enjoy advantages like smaller classrooms,
regular access to computers, and better teachers. Admission into the magnet is not easy,
however. Cedric had to apply multiple times to the Math & Science magnet and, even after
finally gaining entry, had to work to maintain his position. “I feel the quality matters if you go to
a different program. Like Math & Science, they push you way more. But if you mess up, they’re
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gonna try to kick you out. So you gotta be on your stuff you know what I mean?” Cedric
explained that being “on your stuff” entails more than just getting good grades. “Because like it’s
only the top students in magnet. Even though a lot of students aren’t top students in magnet, you
gotta be really on your stuff…That doesn’t mean they get good grades though, they just gotta
watch out and not get in trouble.” Cedric’s teammate on the baseball team, Marcus, is also in the
Math & Science magnet. Marcus gained entry into the magnet with help from his coach, Coach
Colvin. According to Marcus, Coach Colvin personally introduced him to the magnet
coordinator during the summer before his first year at Park Heights High. He felt like this helped
him get into the selective program.
On the other side of the academic quality spectrum, and on the opposite side of campus,
is Park Heights’s special education program. The special education program is housed in a set of
portable classrooms that are physically removed from the magnet program and the “regular”
classrooms. I interviewed one student-athlete at Park Heights who was enrolled in the special
education program. Josue transferred into Park Heights from another state before his junior year.
Josue and his mother moved to Los Angeles to live with her family after Josue’s father was
arrested and sent to prison. Josue believed that his history of fighting in school and a previous
expulsion led to him being placed in the special education program at Park Heights. Josue was
critical of the lack of educational opportunity at his school: “It’s like the teachers treat you like
you’re stupid or something. And like regular classes, they got their computers and everything.
Our special ed classes were lucky we got books, to be honest. So they don’t really fund it as
much as the regular classes so...” In addition to the funding levels and the quality of teachers,
Josue was also critical of the way that other students treated his classmates in the special
education track:
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They’re [the other special education students] just a little bit slower, but that’s pretty much it.
I don’t feel they should be treated different because of that. I been seeing that a lot of kids be
doing them dirty and they’re pissing me off…Yeah and it’s really messed up ‘cause I’m one
of them and it’s like they [his teammates] don’t even know so they be keeping it cool with
me. Like I’m one of them and I’m like, “Leave them alone!” when I see it…But yeah, they’re
just treated different and it ain’t right if you ask me.

Josue uses his athlete status to mask or to compensate for his enrollment in the special education
program. Later sections of this chapter will discuss how peer status and social standing operate at
Park Heights. For Josue, and for other Park Heights student-athletes who are not enrolled in the
Math & Science magnet, earning a college athletic scholarship is how they anticipate pursuing
postsecondary education.
The stakes of sports participation are extremely high for student-athletes at Park Heights
because they perceive limited academic opportunity structures and chances at academic mobility
at their school. Sports participation at Park Heights serves as both an identity resource and
mobility strategy for student-athletes. In addition to giving young men another way to develop
themselves and become more attached to the school, many Park Heights student-athletes see
sports as their best shot at a college scholarship. Despite the fact that several of them did not play
on the varsity team or appear to show unique athletic talent, the idea that "I can do it if I work
hard enough" seemed commonplace among Park Heights athletes. Other researchers on youth
sports have found that Black males are more likely than other young athletes to believe that they
can and will continue playing sports after high school (May 2009). Despite knowing the slim
chances that my respondents will earn a college athletic scholarship, it was important for me to
take seriously that, here and now, a young man is basing a major life transition on his ability to
play sports. Following the phenomenological viewpoint, I treat this as a real possibility because
these young men feel that it is a real possibility. Football players at Park Heights were most
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likely to adopt a “D-1 athlete” student-athlete identity. One of the team mottos, which appeared
on their team shirts, on the wall of their weight room, and on their Facebook page, was “Who’s
Next?” This team motto draws on the past success of a handful of Park Heights football players
who managed to play at elite colleges and the professional level. As I described in Chapter
Three, these players have their jerseys enshrined in the rafters of the Park Heights weight room,
which casts a literal and symbolic shadow over the program. This D-1 athlete identity is also
enabled by the Park Heights student-athletes’ experience with their school’s poor academic
quality. Unlike the young men at College Prep, and those in the AP/honors track at Pacific Coast,
most student-athletes at Park Heights reported feeling like sports were their only way to achieve
a college education.

High School Sports Participation and Academic Performance
Male student-athletes across schools described very different academic opportunity
structures. When young men perceived limited or insufficient access to quality academic
training, sports participation emerges as an available compensatory source of school attachment
and identity development. Thus, a young man choses to adopt a student-athlete identity – such as
the scholar-athlete or the “D-1 athlete” – based on his perceived or actual access to academic
opportunities. However, one question remains: how, if at all, does playing sports in high school
impact young men’s academic performance? The answer is not simple or unidirectional. Young
men at all three schools and across teams described sports participation as both helping and
hindering their academic performance. In general, student-athletes in college preparatory
academic tracks told me that, if anything, their sports participation detracted from their ability to
reach their academic potential. Dominic, a College Prep baseball player who takes several AP
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courses, describes the challenges that intense sports participation presents: “Academically, it
[baseball activity] keeps me up all night ‘cause I miss out on that two-and-a-half or three hours
from practice.” Dominic makes up for his lack of sleep by sleeping during class sometimes or
skipping lunch to sleep in his car at school. He justifies playing sports at the expense of his sleep
because of the other skills he feels he learns. “Then again, it helps me manage my time better and
to study smarter, instead of harder. ‘Cause now on the car ride from school I'm studying or if I'm
driving I record myself going over notes so I can listen to it later.” Male student-athletes who are
in challenging academic tracks seem accept the burden that sports place on their time and
academic performance because of other benefits. For some, like Dominic, this includes learning
time management skills that they foresee using in college. Others believe that their college
resume is improved by showing that they can do well in school, while still playing sports at a
high level.
Student-athletes who are enrolled in remedial or “regular” classes were typically
unequivocal that sports participation benefits their academic performance. These young men
described their classes as “not that hard,” and used sports as a way to remain focused or
motivated in these classes. Terrance, a sophomore basketball player at Pacific Coast who is in
“the regulars,” said that remaining eligible to play basketball was a motivation to do well in
school:
I mean, my sports it does [help my grades]. It kinda keeps me focused a little bit…I mean, I
like sports way more than my academics! I can do the work, I’m very intelligent, but I’m just
very, very lazy. And I don’t want to do anything as far as school other than my sports. I
mean, I do it, but I don’t want to do it. Staying above a 2-0 keeps me focused. I’m not trying
to lose PT (playing time) over grades.

Terrance was academically ineligible for part of his freshman year and had to sit out several
games for the JV team at the end of his first season. Other respondents in remedial curricular
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tracks felt pushed by their coaches and teammates to excel in the classroom. Coach Phillips, the
track and field coach at Park Heights, receives academic progress reports when his team
members fail a test, miss an assignment, or skip class. Alvin, a senior jumper on the Park Heights
track team, has been on the wrong side of those reports. “With Coach, it’s like even if you’re
eligible, you can still get in trouble…I go in trouble for skipping out on my Math class last year
even though I wasn’t failing or nothing.” Some coaches, like Coach Phillips, demanded that their
players do more than remain eligible for competition. As discussed previously, some respondents
described their teachers as unfair or unfit, and saw their classmates as disruptive. Thus, coaches
who emphasized excelling in the classroom and teammates who are in AP or honors courses
provided student-athletes with an external source of motivation to do well in school.

Student-Athlete Risky Social Behavior and Social Status
In his classic book, The Adolescent Society, James Coleman finds that young men that
played high school sports, as a social group, received noticeably higher levels of social status and
popularity than other groups in high school (Coleman 1961). This finding was echoed in
subsequent research on school social status (Eitzen 1975), yet no consensus has been reached
about the consequences or the causes of this elevated status. Research finds that, in addition to
elevated popularity at school, male student-athletes are more likely to participate in some deviant
or risky behaviors such as underage drinking and fighting (Fejgin 1994; Eccles and Barber 1999;
Miller et al. 2003; Eccles et al. 2003; Miller et al. 2006; Hartmann and Massoglia 2007; Miller et
al. 2007). The student-athletes I spoke with participated in very different kinds of social
behavior. According to respondents, the “party scene” at each school was very different and
student-athletes played different roles in each school’s “scene.” There are also some important
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differences within each school, as student-athletes on certain teams report different levels of
risky behavior.
The following section uses descriptive statistics to outline the “party” behavior of
student-athletes in my sample. Results reveal some stark differences in risky social behavior both
between schools and within schools. Subsequent sections use interview data to illuminate why
such differences exist among student-athletes. After describing the social behavior of student-
athletes, this section concludes by talking about how these young men fit into the overall social
hierarchies of their high school. Student-athlete behaviors, both in the hallways and on the
weekend, shape student-athlete identity for young men. Similar to the academic opportunity
structures, young men describe having unequal access to claiming social status. White student-
athletes, and some Black student-athletes, from affluent families appear to be the most popular
and most active socially. However, student-athletes from working-class and low-income families
feel less connected to the social life of their high schools and use sports participation as a way to
claim meaningful group membership and status at school.

Student-Athlete Risky Social Behavior
In my survey of current male student-athletes, I asked respondents if they had ever
participated in five social behaviors that past research has identified as “risky” or “deviant”
(Hartmann and Massoglia 2007; Miller et al. 2007; Kreager 2007): attending parties where
underage drinking was taking place, drinking alcohol underage, smoking marijuana, getting into
fights outside of school, or getting arrested. Some party behaviors appear very common among
College Prep student-athletes. Among College prep respondents, 71% report attending a party
where drinking was happening and more than half of them (52%) have drank alcohol themselves
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(see Table 4.2 below). Indeed, respondents from College Prep were far more likely than those
from Pacific Coast High or Park Heights High to report these alcohol-related behaviors. Along
with these cross-school differences, there appear to be some important within school differences
in College Prep student-athlete drinking behavior. Among College Prep respondents, the football
and baseball team members are the most likely to have drank alcohol or been around underage
drinking. These two Prep teams appear far more likely than the cross-country and soccer teams
to have been involved with underage drinking. The only team outside of College Prep with high
rates of drinking behavior is the baseball team at Pacific Coast High; over half (57%) of Pacific
Coast’s baseball players have been around underage drinking and 51% have drank alcohol,
themselves. Drinking is especially uncommon among Pacific Coast’s cross-country, track and
field, and basketball teams. Subsequent sections use interview data to illuminate these
differences in drinking-related behavior.
There seems to more parity across schools in terms of marijuana usage. While more than
half of the student-athletes at College Prep reported drinking alcohol, only 28% said that they
had smoked marijuana. The frequency of marijuana use at College Prep is only slightly lower at
Pacific Coast (19%) and Park Heights (23%). Similar to drinking related behavior, College
Prep’s football team (36%) and Pacific Coast’s baseball team (41%) were the most likely to have
smoke marijuana at their respective schools. Despite relatively less frequent drinking behavior
and similar rates of marijuana use to the other two schools, Park Heights respondents reported
the highest frequency of the most serious forms of risky social behavior: fighting outside of
school and getting arrested. More than a quarter of Park Heights’ student-athletes (26%) reported
having been in a fight outside of school and 10% said that they had been arrested. The frequency
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of both outcomes were highest among the school’s basketball team, as 42% reported getting into
fights and 17% said they had been arrested at some point.
The following sections use interview data to illuminate the descriptive statistics presented
here. Why are College Prep students so much more likely to participate in drinking behavior, but
not as likely to get into fights or have run-ins with law enforcement? Why are Park Heights
respondents so much more likely than other respondents to get into fights and get arrested? Why
do the baseball players at Pacific Coast drink and smoke marijuana at higher rates than other
teams at the school?
Table 4.2 Descriptive Statistics of Risky Social Behavior by School & Six Most Popular Sports (N =
534)

College Prep
High

Pacific Coast
High

Park Heights
High
% that have attended a party w/ underage drinking 71%, N=272 40%, N=174 45%, N=88
Track and Field 57%, N=98 20%, N=30 45%, N=55
Football 84%, N=67 40%, N=45 49%, N=69
X-Country 46%, N=56 21%, N=39 25%, N=12
Baseball 75%, N=52 57%, N=35 53%, N=19
Soccer 56%, N=62 40%, N=35 --
Basketball 60%, N=10 47%, N=49 50%, N=12

% drank alcohol 52% 27% 32%
Track and Field 37% 10% 35%
Football 57% 29% 33%
X-Country 36% 15% 33%
Baseball 56% 51% 32%
Soccer 39% 20% --
Basketball 40% 16% 25%

% smoked marijuana 28% 19% 23%
Track and Field 17% 20% 24%
Football 36% 9% 22%
X-Country 11% 15% 17%
Baseball 21% 41% 21%
Soccer 24% 20% --
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Basketball 30% 14% 17%

% gotten into a fight outside of school 19% 22% 26%
Track and Field 15% 20% 28%
Football 28% 36% 29%
X-Country 11% 15% 8%
Baseball 25% 26% 21%
Soccer 23% 11% --
Basketball 10% 26% 42%

% that have ever been arrested 1% 5% 10%
Track and Field 1% 3% 9%
Football 0% 2% 12%
X-Country 2% 5% 0%
Baseball 0% 11% 10%
Soccer 2% 0% --
Basketball
0% 6% 17%

“Water Polo Guys Throw the Best Parties”
The male student-athletes at College Prep were the most likely to report certain types of
deviant or risky behavior. As discussed in previous sections, these young men performed better
in school, identified the more as a “student,” and were more likely to anticipate earning a four-
year college degree than respondents from Pacific Coast or Park Heights. When asked to
describe the “party scene” at their school, College Prep respondents universally said that it
revolves around two beach cities (e.g. Manhattan Beach and the Pacific Palisades) and Pasadena.
According to respondents, you could likely find a College Prep house party nearly every
weekend in these highly affluent parts of Los Angeles. Gabriel is a senior on the Prep football
team and self-describes as a “benchwarmer,” a decidedly casual member of the team. When
asked to describe who is at the center of the College Prep party scene, Mark did not hesitate:
Um, probably the upper-middle class White guys…Pasadena and Manhattan Beach. Like the
white guys. Like I know for the Manhattan Beach guys, its' like the parents are well off, so
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what I've heard is that the parent's go on vacation and just leave the kids at home. They don't
really care. So like the kids have a lot of, I guess, freedom. They're just kids so they take
advantage…Yeah, like they have fake ID's. If they don't have it, a friend will have it and they
go get some alcohol.

Other College Prep respondents confirmed that it was the wealthy and mostly White students that
host parties because their parents are more permissible with them drinking alcohol. Student-
athletes from these neighborhoods were no more or less likely than non-athletes to host parties.
However, volleyball and water polo players were disproportionately the teams in these areas who
hosted the parties and were associated with the “party scene” at College Prep
19
. Because College
Prep students were allowed to drink and party at houses in affluent areas, it is likely that they
were able to avoid the more serious consequences often associated with drinking in public
spaces.
Black, Latino, and Asian College Prep respondents reported less involvement in drinking
and other risky behaviors, perhaps partially due to the fact that the party scene revolved around
affluent White neighborhoods. Indeed, Prep student-athletes across race admitted that friendship
groups tended to fall along racial lines, even though “everyone gets along with everyone” at the
school. White student-athletes at College Prep insisted that race did not explicitly influence
social networks or who parties together on the weekends. Rather, they felt the racial
homogeneity of friendship groups was due to neighborhood of residence and friendships prior to
high school. Alex, a White senior on the soccer team, offers his theory on why friendship groups
tend to cluster by race at College Prep:
Like this is the only time that people come from all over to a certain place…Someone like
from Crenshaw just isn’t going to go to St. Agnes in Manhattan Beach. Like, that’s all

19
Because College Prep was the only school with a water polo team and because Park Heights did not have a
volleyball team, these teams were not among the top-6 most popular sports teams. Thus, they were not included in
the descriptive tables.
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Manhattan Beach kids. So when you get to high school, you kind of gravitate towards the
kind of kids that you’ve grown up with. Like not necessarily the exact kids that you grew up
with, but like the same types of kids because that’s just what you’re used to. And that’s kind
of like the start of freshman year. And you get good friends like your freshman year and you
kind of stick with those people the entire way. And yes like I’m still like pretty good friends
with other people, but I’m just closer and hang out more with the kids that are more like the
people I grew up with. So and that kind of I mean like most of the African American kids
they all grew up in like Crenshaw and um Ladera Heights and places like those, and so when
they get to College Prep they gravitate towards the kinds of people that live there.

Several White respondents at College Prep echo Alex’s theory. They suggest that race plays a
secondary or passive role in shaping who hangs out with whom.
Conversely, Black respondents at Prep describe race as playing a more active role in shaping
social groups at school. To varying degrees, the seven Black student-athletes I interviewed
recounted experiences where they felt uncomfortable or unwelcomed at the school. Dominic, a
Black senior on the baseball team, shared a story that took place just two months into his
freshman year at College Prep:
So freshman year I encountered a situation where I was called a derogatory term by a white
senior. And if it weren’t for the African American Alumni Association, I…I don’t know if
I’d be sitting here right now…I was going to my locker and I had my backpack on the floor
in front of this guy’s locker. Then he came up with his friends or whatever and said, “Get out
of my way n-word.” But he said the actual word. And I was like "whoa" because they preach
like tolerance and stuff like that and I think... I guess it was a little like naive to think that
everybody was that way, because obviously it's not. But it definitely threw me for a loop as a
freshman.
In response to this confrontation, Dominic met with Mr. Greer, the head of the school’s African
American Alumni Association (aka “A-4”). “He like coached me through it. He’s like, ‘You
know what? Don’t let that get to you. Because this place…if you’re gonna let that little situation
impact your entire four years here, then maybe this place isn’t for you.’” Dominic assured me
that overtly racist incidents were not common at the school, but that they happen enough to
remind him and his Black classmates that they are a minority at the school.
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The A-4 plays a pivotal role in recruiting Black students and supporting them through
their four years at College Prep. Damien is a Black freshman soccer player at College Prep
whose parents drive him about an hour each way so that he can attend the school. Damien had
never attended a majority-White school before and was concerned about how he’d fit in.
However, he says the A-4 helped make him feel at home. The students and teachers in the A-4
host an orientation, for incoming freshman and their parents, the week before classes start. “The
orientation is just so you can like see and meet new people, the upper classmen. The moderator
and the teachers in the club, they were saying, “Yeah, if you need us we’ll help you like
whatever you need during the year and stuff.” According to Damien and other Black student-
athletes at College Prep, sports are another way that Black and Latino students form friendship
groups at the school. The majority of these students come from middle schools where few, if
any, of their classmates enroll in College Prep. Thus, Black and Latino students begin their high
school careers with significantly smaller friendship groups than their White classmates. Damien
felt that Black students at Prep who did not play sports had a much harder time making friends
and feeling connected to the school. “I mean, if you’re kinda shy or don’t like play sports, it can
be really hard to make friends. I don’t really know what they [Black non-athletes] do.”
However, the cross-race friendships that form in sports do not appear to extend to social
life outside of school. Nathan, a junior at Prep, is the only Black member of the water polo team.
Nathan felt that water polo, both at College Prep and with his summer club team, has allowed
him to meet and befriend people who he otherwise may not have met. Nathan was raised in a
middle-class historically Black neighborhood in Los Angeles and did not have many White
friends before high school. “I was always really skinny, so football wasn’t gonna work for me!”
Nathan explains. “I always really liked swimming, so I decided to go out for water polo
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freshman year…All the other Black kids were playing football.” Despite being friendly with his
White water polo teammates, Nathan said that he rarely hung out with these peers outside of
team activities. This distance was made clear while I was administering my survey to the water
polo team. As team members – nearly all of them 6-feet tall, tan, and blonde – emerged from the
locker room to meet me on the pool deck, I overheard them calling to each other using
nicknames. When Nathan came out of the locker room as some of his teammates called out,
“Hurry up, Chocolate! Let’s go, Chocolate!” During our interview, I asked Nathan about this
incident and he confirmed that this was, in fact, his nickname among teammates. However, he
insisted that “it’s all good,” that the nickname was only in fun. Black student-athletes such as
Nathan seem to form surface-level friendships with non-Black teammates. These casual
friendships seem to make day-to-day school attendance more enjoyable, but do not extend to
meaningful friendships that extend beyond campus or outside of team activities. Thus, the social
distance evinced in College Prep’s party scene also manifests in the school’s sports program. The
increased cross-racial interaction in sports activities does not spill over to more meaningful
friendships outside of school.

The “Rowdy Jocks” of the Pacific Coast Baseball Team
Unlike College Prep, where sports reduced social distance between students and allowed
them to form relationships with teammates from different backgrounds, the teams at Pacific
Coast tended to be very homogenous and socially exclusive. I have previously shown that the
student body of Pacific Coast High is, in many ways, bifurcated along racial and socioeconomic
lines; the bussers and the locals, as well as the “regulars” and the “smart classes” have been
discussed. The school’s sports teams are no exception to this trend. Both survey and interview
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data reveal a great deal of difference across the sports teams at Pacific Coast High. According to
respondents, each team has its own reputation. The cross-country team is “the smart team.” The
football guys are “the tough guys.” And the baseball team is “the rowdy team.”
When I asked Ronnie which team at Pacific Coast High partied the most, he smiled and
said, “That’s easy! It’s the baseball guys.” Ronnie, a Black junior on the football team, explained
that the baseball guys all had “the best party houses” because they were close to school and large
enough to host a lot of people. “Some of their parents don’t even care…They buy the beer
sometimes.” Thus, the Pacific Coast and College Prep party scenes were similar. At both
schools, the student-athletes with large houses and parents who allowed underage drinking in
their homes were the center of the school’s party scene.
During our interviews, I asked each of the four Pacific Coast High baseball players about
this reputation and their social lives on the weekends. David, the senior captain of the baseball
team, admitted that the team is known to host parties and be at the center of the school’s social
scene. However, David clarified that not all of the social gatherings involved heavy drinking or
even a lot of people. “I mean, we host a lot of the stuff, but most of it is just kick-backs or
whatever…Like last week, I had a little kick-back at my house for my birthday. We just played
some BP [beer pong] and played video games.” During my interviews with the baseball team, I
learned that there was an important difference between a “kick-back” and a “party.” Devon, a
junior on the baseball team, explains the difference:
It’s like, a kick-back will be just the baseball guys or maybe some of our friends from the
football or basketball team…We’re a really popular group, so people like to hang out with
us...Alright, so a party would be like, alright there’s a DJ, there’s a dance floor, there’s girls,
there’s like a bar, there’s like…people charge you to get in and stuff.

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Smoking marijuana does not seem to be a big deal to Pacific Coast student-athletes and happens
at both kick-backs and parties. Harder drug use, such as cocaine, occasionally happens at parties,
although no respondents claimed to have used it. Some Pacific Coast respondents completely
avoid parties because of the risks associated with being caught drinking. Max, a senior from the
football team, regularly attends kick-backs hosted by the baseball players, but never goes to their
parties. “Yeah, it’s not really you know, my thing,” Max explains. “I like hanging out with my
friends and just having some beers and watching a movie…I mean it’s hard to get into that kinda
stuff [going to parties]. It just gets in the way of playing football. I mean like obviously like once
or twice I’ve tried it, but it’s like, you know, I don’t like it that much.” By hosting kick-backs
and parties, the Pacific Coast baseball players are widely known at the school and are seen as
popular. Further, the baseball players all referred to each other as “brothers” or “like a family.”
They regularly eat lunch together at the same picnic table on campus.
Conversely, the cross-country runners at Pacific Coast described feeling anonymous at
school and rarely participated in parties or social gatherings. These young men, like a handful of
other Pacific Coast teams, described sports as playing a very small role in their high school lives.
Jason, an API junior who lives near Pacific Coast, explained why he chose to join the cross-
country team: “Well originally I was in normal P.E. and I did not really like that so…I figured
that I would take a sport to see what a team sport would be like. It was fun for me so I ended up
staying.” Jason had never played team sports before high school. His prior extracurricular
experiences included chess club and private violin lessons. Several of the Pacific Coast locals
talked about the sports participation in terms of “taking” a sport because they received physical
education credits for participating. Casual sports participants maintained close friendships
outside of the team setting. Chris, an API senior, ran cross-country for all four years. Like Jason,
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Chris “took” cross-country rather than P.E. during his first year at Pacific Coast. Despite
dedicating four years to the sport, Chris was indifferent about the role that sports has played in
his life. “I’m much more invested in the Interact Club [a community service club] more than
cross-country. I don’t know what it is about that club, it just seems more fun…Like Interact
members hang out with each other and it’s more than just a club. We actually like become good
friend in that club.”
Chris, Jason, and several other White and API student-athletes at Pacific Coast described
themselves as average athletes that were far more invested in non-sports aspects of high school.
These student-athletes adopt a “benchwarmer” student-athlete identity where sports participation
was something to do for fun, but remained a secondary or tertiary aspect of their high school
careers. Unlike scholar-athletes, who approach sports and academics with a competitive attitude,
benchwarmers did not identify particularly strongly as students. These young men saw
themselves as “just kinda average” in many regards and weren’t especially passionate about
sports or school.

Ballin’ Under Control
“A teacher can make every such contest an occasion for emphatic lessons in conduct, and do
much to educate his boys to despise any and all unfair conduct, to avoid profanity, and betting,
and to play like gentlemen.”

– Principal Henry L. Boltwood, 1889
as quoted in Pruter (2013, p. 16)

As the above quote shows, high school sport has served a disciplinary function for young
men since its inception (Bundgaard 2005; Pruter 2013). However, the lessons that sport
purportedly teaches young men have changed slightly over time, as hegemonic masculinity has
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shifted its boundaries. Rather than the “muscular Christianity” of the early 20
th
century, modern
proponents of high school sports argue that sports teach values such as leadership and teamwork.
Female athletes’ entrance into high school sports, after the 1972 passage of Title IX challenged
traditional male dominance over the resources and ideology of interscholastic sports. How could
sports remain a tool for “making men” with all these women now participating (and having legal
grounds from which to make demands for sports access)? In spite of the challenges to racial and
gender orders, high school sport continues to justify its existence via the lessons it teaches
athletes. Like sports, schools are socially constructed institutions that both shape and are shaped
by shifting racial and gender orders.
Educational researchers argue that zero-tolerance discipline policies in schools, begun in
the early 1990s, shape and are shaped by racial meanings in schools (Noguera 1996; Hirschfield
2008; Reynolds et al. 2008; Kim, Losen, and Hewitt 2010; Nolan 2011). The negative effects of
exclusionary discipline are felt unequally across race and gender for young people (Arcia 2006,
2007). While “zero tolerance” policies have led to higher rates of suspension and expulsion
across the board, they have disproportionately affected Black and Latino young men. The
disproportionate use of discipline on Black children has been a “highly consistent finding” for
over 30 years (Skiba et al. 2011). Researchers have controlled for socio-economic status,
geography and the possibility that Black students “were simply more prone to misbehavior,” and
repeatedly find disproportionate discipline rates along racial lines (Skiba et al. 2000).
The following sections explore how male student-athletes view and experience school
discipline at College Prep, Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights High. First, descriptive statistics
reveal that student-athletes at Park Heights High experience the most severe forms of school
discipline far more often than those at College Prep or Pacific Coast High. Subsequent sections
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use interview data to show how male student-athletes think about their school’s disciplinary
systems. College Prep respondents explained that athletes receive no preferential treatment when
it comes to school discipline. Several of them referenced the same disciplinary incident to
support this claim. By contrast, Park Heights student-athletes described a highly punitive
disciplinary system at their school that involved frequent interactions with security guards,
school police, and school administration. These young men described the most severe forms of
misconduct, such as violent fights, on-campus drug use, and gambling in the bathroom during
class. Park Heights respondents from the baseball and basketball teams sought to define
themselves as different from non-athletes and their coaches, actively encouraged them to be
leaders in the school. These young men adopted a “school captain” identity whereby they felt the
need to be examples of good behavior and school citizenship.

Punitive Discipline Experiences across School and Sports Team
The survey instrument given to all current student-athletes included a five-item section on
school-based discipline that asked respondents if they had ever experienced various forms of
school discipline, with the severity of the discipline increasing with each question. The mildest
form of discipline was receiving a detention and the most severe form of discipline was being
suspended or expelled from school. Of the three schools, respondents from College Prep reported
the highest frequency of detentions. Indeed, close to two-thirds of all College Prep student-
athletes had received a detention. Despite the highest frequency of detentions, College Prep
respondents reported very few experiences with more severe forms of school discipline. For
example, 31% of Pacific Coast respondents and 44% of Park Heights respondents had been
removed from class by a teacher, as compared to only 14% of College Prep respondents. Some
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significant variation exists across sports teams at Pacific Coast and Park Heights. At both
schools, cross-country team members were the least likely to have been kicked out of class (20%
at Pacific Coast and 25% at Park Heights). This compares to 44% of the Pacific Coast baseball
players and close to half (49%) of the football players at Park Heights.
The between-school discipline disparities among male student-athletes increase as the
severity of punishments intensify. Park Heights student-athletes appear far more likely than other
respondents to experience the most severe forms of school discipline. For example, over one-
third (35%) of Park Heights respondents had been searched by a security guard, including 58%
of the school’s basketball players. This compares to only 20% of Pacific Coast respondents and
7% of College Prep respondents. Finally, 15% of Park Heights student-athletes had been
suspended or expelled from high school. The following section uses interview data to explore
how Park Heights respondents enact a “school captain” student-athlete identity within a highly
punitive school context. This experience is juxtaposed with College Prep respondents who rarely
faced classroom removal or felt targeted by disciplinary systems at school.

Table 4.3 Descriptive Statistics of Punitive Discipline Experiences by School & Six Most Popular
Sports (N = 534)

College Prep
High

Pacific Coast
High

Park Heights
High
% been given a detention 65%, N=272 57%, N=173 48%, N=88
Track and Field 59%, N=98 50%, N=30 45%, N=55
Football 70%, N=67 77%, N=44 46%, N=69
X-Country 55%, N=56 31%, N=39 58%, N=12
Baseball 77%, N=52 66%, N=35 47%, N=19
Soccer 55%, N=62 51%, N=35 --
Basketball 70%, N=10 63%, N=49 42%, N=12

% been kicked out of class by a teacher 14% 31% 44%
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Track and Field 9% 27% 42%
Football 16% 37% 49%
X-Country 11% 20% 25%
Baseball 21% 44% 32%
Soccer 18% 37% --
Basketball 0% 29% 42%

% been searched by a security guard at school 7% 20% 35%
Track and Field 7% 37% 42%
Football 3% 23% 33%
X-Country 5% 23% 32%
Baseball 6% 23% 37%
Soccer 8% 23% --
Basketball 0% 18% 58%

% been given a ticket at school 0% 0% 7%
Track and Field 0% 0% 7%
Football 1% 0% 7%
Baseball 0% 0% 5%
X-Country 0% 0% 0%
Soccer 1% 0% --
Basketball 0% 0% 0%

% been suspended or expelled 1% 4% 15%
Track and Field 2% 3% 13%
Football 1% 2% 14%
X-Country 0% 2% 9%
Baseball 2% 6% 16%
Soccer 1% 6% --
Basketball
0% 2% 17%

Firm, but Fair: The Disciplinary System at College Prep
College Prep’s Catholic parochial school style was evidenced in its disciplinary system.
Nearly every student-athlete I spoke with at College Prep had been given a detention, or Justice
Under God (“JUG” for short). Regardless of their academic track or the amount of partying they
do on the weekend, every College Prep respondent had received a JUG at some point. Damien, a
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freshman on the soccer team, explained what JUG is: “For the regular JUGs you just write a ten-
word sentence that the dean gives you. But you have to number each word though! Like sixty
sentences! You have to write the sentence sixty times and you have to number each word.” Other
JUGs involve doing manual labor around the school such as changing light bulbs, cleaning
locker rooms, or working in the library. College Prep respondents earned JUG for small rules
infractions, such as having an untucked shirt, having a cell phone ring in class, not being clean-
shaven, chewing gum on campus, or arriving even one minute late to class. Despite the strict
enforcement, Prep student-athletes insisted that the rules were fair. A few of them took pride in
how strict the school’s rules were enforced. “We all knew what we signed up for when we came
here [College Prep],” explains Alex, a senior captain on the soccer team. “If someone doesn’t, if
they don’t like the rules, they should go someplace else.”
Given College Prep’s immense investment in its sports program, and its rich tradition of
athletic success, I expected that some athletes might experience more leniency in terms of school
discipline. This was far from the case. Andre, a senior star on the football team, received a JUG
during homecoming week of his junior year. “Yea like last year I got JUG during homecoming
week. I had to do like a bunch of wind sprints after practice or something like that. And I still
had to go to JUG on Saturday because I had to go to practice!” In all of my interviews, I asked
respondents if student-athletes were treated any differently in terms of discipline at school. At
least ten College Prep students responded to this question by recounting the story of Skyler
Harris. Mark, a senior on the basketball team, was on the team with Skyler and recalls the
incident:
So, have you heard about Skyler Harris yet? He was like the best basketball player to
ever come to Prep. I mean, the guy was unreal. He could dunk during eighth
grade…Yeah, and it was right before the CIF playoffs and Skyler could of carried us all
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the way. He was so good. He plays for [a Pac-12 school] now…But he got caught
cheating on a photography assignment. He like borrowed slides from someone else in the
class and turned them in. Then the teacher caught him, sent him to the dean...Yeah so
there’s a three-strike policy at our school with cheating and it was Skyler’s third time
getting caught…So if anybody was going to get treated differently, it was going to be
him. But he got kicked out.

Several other Prep respondents pointed to the Skyler Harris story as proof that the school does
not treat athletes, even star athletes, any differently.

“Weirdos” and “School Captains” at Park Heights
Some student-athletes at Park Heights felt as though they were held to a higher standard
than non-athletes at their school. This was especially the case for football players and baseball
players, whose coaches encouraged teachers to call, email, or approach them about the behavior
of their players. These young men expressed frustration with being held to a higher standard than
their non-athletes peers, but also described resentment toward their non-athlete peers who
misbehave in class or in the hallways. Marcus, a senior on the baseball team, remembered a time
when he was punished for the actions of his disruptive classmates:
And in my 9th grade year, during my Introduction to Law class…it was one of those classes
where the teacher doesn't like any of the students ‘cause they’re loud and just ignorant...This
was an elective, thankfully, but I kinda got cheated out of that class. Like our teacher told us
at the end when finals came around, “You made my year miserable so I’m gonna give you a
hard final.” (chuckles) The hardest final ever! So that wasn't fun though…But at the same
time, I get it because kids would just bring food into the class and just eat right in front of her
and get up and walk around the class when she was talking. It was bad.

Several Park Heights respondents described their male, non-athlete classmates as deviant, lazy,
or as “clowns.” Reggie, a junior track and football team member, puts it very bluntly: “I feel like
basically, if you’re not playing football [at Park Heights], you’re like a weirdo…Not even just
football. If you’re not playing a sport, you’re just weird.” I asked Reggie what marks these
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students as “weird” or what kinds of things they do that student-athletes do not do. “They ditch
school, or like smoke and drink at school. Stuff like that. I’m not saying like they’re not good at
athletics. Everyone has their thing. They’re like weirdos and nerds and stuff. Like nerds that
aren’t even good at school.”
One of Marcus’s sophomore teammates on the baseball team, Antwoine, felt like some of
the other Park Heights athletes were just as detrimental to the school environment as the non-
athletes. When asked which groups of students get in trouble most often at Park Heights,
Antwoine shook his head and laughed:
(Chuckles) If you were to go on campus, I think you would be able to pick out like which
ones are the basketball players. Mainly because they’re always hanging around like in their
little groupies. And they're loud! They're always up to some nonsense, there. I mean they're
funny guys, like I know a lot of them. I'm cool with them. But like coach [Colvin of the
baseball team] tells us to like separate ourselves from them, so like, you know…Like if you
were to go to the bathroom you would see them shooting dice in the bathroom. Just doing
stuff they know they shouldn't be doing.

Some Park Heights student-athletes used sports participation to distinguish themselves from
classmates whom they saw as caustic to the school environment.
Indeed, the football and baseball teams’ head coaches encouraged this distinction.
Members of these teams said that their coaches regularly called upon them to “be different” or to
“be better” than other students at the school. Both Coach Colvin of the baseball team and Coach
Williams of the football team were Park Heights alumni, which their players felt fueled their
desire to improve the school and to hold their players to a higher behavioral and academic
standard. Frustrated with the behavior of last year’s players, Coach Williams instituted a
mandatory drug testing program for his football players. He also raised the minimum grade point
average from 2.0 to 2.5. I asked Clarence, a freshman football player, what he thought about
these new team policies. Clarence said that the new rules came about because seniors from last
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year’s team were getting high before games and that they had had key players struggle with
academic eligibility. He commended Coach Williams’s new approach and felt like he was more
concerned with team behavior and grades than he was about winning.
Similarly, Coach Colvin requires his baseball players to regularly do “campus cleanups’
on the weekend. On Saturdays or Sundays, usually before or after their practice, baseball players
will go around the campus and pick up trash, clean graffiti tags, or even garden. According to
team captain Marcus, Coach Colvin makes an effort to connect his players to the broader Park
Heights community of alumni and local residents. This was evident to Marcus last season, when
Park Heights won the city baseball championship:
I know what helped with that was um before the championship, Coach Colvin told us, just
not pressuring, he was like, “This community needs some healing and you guys are the
medicine for that.” Like, “You guys got to get up ‘cause we play at the end of the second
semester.” We were able to witness the basketball season go down bad and the football
season was bad too. So we seen them lose and Coach always talked to us about how they
lose, why they losing. And how he can be different. He says if you go around at lunch and
see what they're doing like, how will that help them on the field? And then we're like, “It
doesn't. It's the way they act.” Like they're all without a hall pass or they doing the bathroom
stuff so…So he's like, 'We have the luxury of playing last.” So that helped us a lot. And
winning the championship, he said that we did that for the community.

Coach Colvin’s and Coach Williams’ team policies and coaching styles make it clear that they
saw sports as a way to change their players, as well as the broader school culture.

High School Sports Participation and School Discipline
The findings in this section add some nuance to and raise questions about the findings I
present in Chapter 2. Regression results from Chapter 2 showed that that young adult males who
played sports in high school were no more likely to experience suspension or expulsion than
non-athletes. However, the descriptive survey data and interview data presented in this chapter
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suggest that the relationship between sports participation and experiences with punitive
discipline vary drastically by school context. For example, College Prep student-athletes
frequently experienced low-level school discipline for minor offenses. However, hardly any of
them experienced classroom removal, which is the form of discipline associated with the most
detrimental educational outcomes (Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010). Conversely, 44% of
respondents from Park Heights had been kicked out of class and 15% had been suspended or
expelled. While my data is unable to compare these discipline rates to non-athlete males at each
school, respondents at all three schools felt that student-athletes generally got in trouble less
often than non-athletes at their school. Coaches, especially those like Coach Colvin at Park
Heights, seem to have their own system of discipline for their players that circumvents formal
school discipline systems. Coaches with long-standing tenure at a high school appear to inspire
team cultures of “acting right.” These coaches occasionally form their own ways of handling
lower level student-athlete misbehavior. However, as the story of Skyler Harris at College Prep
shows, flagrant rules violations are beyond “in-house” management.
Thus, the findings in Chapter 2 may be missing some key mediating variables that
explain how student-athletes experience school discipline. Future research on the relationship
between high school sports participation and school discipline should include school context
variables like the overall suspension/expulsion rate of a respondent’s high school. Further, the
high school coach and the athlete-coach relationship would be a fruitful way to make sense of
how sports participation influences student-athlete behavior and experiences with school
discipline.

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Conclusion
In this chapter, I show how school systems make more or less available five ideal identity
types. It is possible for student-athletes at College Prep, Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights
high to enact any of these five unique student-athlete identities. However, the ways that
opportunity is structured at each school make these identities unequally available and desirable
to male student-athletes. I use the term “athletic ecology” to describe the ways that each school’s
academic curriculum, social life, and punitive disciplinary systems interact with its sports
program to encourage or discourage particular student-athlete identities.
The abundance of academic resources such as AP courses, high quality teachers, and
caring college councilors at College Prep combine to make the “scholar-athlete” identity widely
available to its student-athletes. Scholar-athletes feel that their sports participation benefits their
academic pursuits in several ways, but they remain first and foremost students. Even when a
college scholarship is available, scholar-athletes prioritize their intellectual development because
they feel that it is a safe, long-term investment than sports.
Conversely, Park Heights student-athletes were highly critical of the lack of academic
opportunities at their school. They described poorly resourced classrooms, teachers who were
inadequate or frustrated by student misbehavior, and disruptive classmates that made it hard to
learn. The exception to this trend was the school’s Math & Science magnet program, which only
about 20% of Park Heights students were able to attend. The students in the Math & Science
program received college preparatory classroom instruction and had access to resources like
computers and higher quality teachers. Park Heights student-athletes who concluded that they
couldn’t get to college via academics, invested heavily in their sports participation and enacted a
“D-1 athlete” identity. This student-athlete identity was encouraged by Park Heights’s rich
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tradition of athletic success and notable alumni who played in college and professionally.
Respondents lifted these individuals up as examples of what was possible if they just worked
hard at sports. Another prominent ideal identity type among Park Heights respondents was the
“school captain.” These young men, particularly the baseball and football players, used sports
participation as way to distinguish themselves from non-athlete classmates whom they saw as
detrimental to the school environment. Rather than academic excellence or athletic stardom, the
school captain concerns himself with “acting right,” being a good school citizen, and leader
among his peers.
Pacific Coast High was a mix of privilege and limitation for student-athletes.
Respondents spoke highly of the AP/honors academic track, but also derided students in the less
rigorous academic track (or “the regulars”) as unmotivated or troublemakers. White and API
students tended to take AP/honors courses at Pacific Coast, while Black and Latino students
were more often found in “the regulars.” Indeed, Pacific Coast’s student body appears segmented
along racial and socioeconomic lines. Two distinct student-athlete identities emerged within this
context: “the rowdy jock” and “the benchwarmer.” The rowdy jock identity was embodied by the
Pacific Coast baseball team, which was largely made up of young men from affluent families
that lives close to the school. These student-athletes were associated with heavy partying on the
weekends and the team members described each other as “brothers” or “like family.” They were
a highly popular and exclusive social group at the school. The absence of a rich athletic history at
the school, and the availability of non-athletic opportunities in the classroom and other
extracurricular activities, led many Pacific Coast respondents to enact a “benchwarmer” student-
athlete identity. These young men were lukewarm at best about their sports participation.
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Benchwarmers described themselves as average or subpar athletes, and only played sports as a
way to get out of physical education classes or as an additional item on their college resume.
The diversity of student-athlete identities among study respondents calls into question the
validity of simple, one-dimensional measures of high school sports participation. Untangling the
complex ways that sports participation impacts young men requires accounting for the school-
level structures that imbue sports with meaning. Findings from Chapter 3 revealed that male
student-athletes bring a range of intersectional identities to bear within schools; race, social class,
and masculinity combined for each young man to influence what school he attended and his
motivations for playing sports in the first place. This chapter has shown that these social forces
continue to exert their influence over young men, as they move through high school. High school
sports are a social space within which young men form identities. Male student-athletes at
College Prep, Pacific Coast, and Park Heights show that a school’s athletic ecology combines
with a student’s race, gender, and family SES to shape student-athlete identity. Privilege and
marginalization are more often than not reflected in high school sports, which raises important
doubts about the ability for sports participation to undermine structural educational inequality.

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CHAPTER 5
COMING IN FROM THE SIDELINES: HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS AS A SOURCE OF
SCHOOL ENGAGEMENT FOR MARGINALIZED YOUNG MEN
Marcus, the captain of the Park Heights baseball team, was highly critical of the lack of
opportunities at his school. However, he found attachment to the school and a leadership role
within the baseball team. Marcus was the quintessential “school captain,” as described in
Chapter Four. The highlight of his high school career was winning the city baseball
championship during his junior season. Marcus remembers that Coach Colvin, a Park Heights
alum, told the team before the championship game that they were going to “win this one for the
community.” I asked Marcus what he thought Coach Colvin meant by that. He replied:
Marcus: Maybe knowing that like, there's some hope left for us, you know? Because hey,
things aren’t all the great at our school. What have we been doing in the past years? Nothing.
So then baseball stepped up and we were able to get something done…I wasn't sure what he
meant by “for the community” until we had our little um, the championship picnic at one of
the parks up at [Park Heights Park] a few minutes after we won. It was kind of a surprise
thing. So we met up there and we thought it was going to be a little BBQ. And we walked
down to the park and there was about like 300-plus people in there. They're all Park Heights
alumni, like people who graduated in the 80s and 90s. And they were all there for us. Like, it
was kind of a big thing.

Jeff: How'd that feel?

Marcus: It felt.. oh, it felt pretty good ‘cause they had music playing while we were walking
through the thing and then we were just talking to a lot of people. Sharing experiences and
stuff from when they were at Park Heights. And there were some of the guys who played
baseball while they were at Park Heights and they were talking to us. And… that was a pretty
good experience. He was like…Coach was like, “I told you. You did a lot for the community
by winning.”

This moment shows one way that school context mediates the high school sports experience for
young men. Other young men that I spoke with had won championships or had success in their
sport. But the combination of Park Heights’s structural challenges and Coach Colvin’s
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mentorship shaped how the baseball players like Marcus experienced the team’s victory.
Objective sports experiences are interpreted subjectively by student-athletes based on their
school’s athletic ecology and their own student-athlete identity. The structural inequality that
Park Heights student-athletes experience was not alleviated with the baseball team’s
championship victory. However, that victory changed the way that Marcus and his teammates
thought about their role in the school and how sports participation impacted the broader Park
Heights community.
This dissertation has shown that young men experience high school sports in very
different ways, depending on the school they attend and their own personal background. My data
show that sports programs are far from objective, uniform aspects of a high school. High school
is an important local context where gender orders and racial orders shape the lives of young men
(Omi and Winant 1994; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The student bodies of College Prep,
Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights High reflect the racial and socioeconomic segregation of
Los Angeles’s neighborhoods. These schools offer students very different prospects for success
in high school and in the transition to young adulthood.
Family SES influences the high school sports experience largely through the school
selection process. Respondents from affluent families were able to access a wider range of
schools and were much more optimistic about the quality of schools that they could attend. High
school sports played a largely supplemental or recreational role for these young men. Rather than
sports, young men from middle-class families primarily focused on other aspects of high school,
such as the academic curriculum or social life. Sports participation played a much more
compensatory or functional role in the imagined high school experience of Black and Latino
young men, most notably those from low-income families. To varying degrees across the three
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schools, Black and Latino male student-athletes experienced high schools as “inequality
regimes,” a concept introduced by Acker (2006) to describe the ways that opportunity and
resources are made accessible or inaccessible within organizations, based on race, class and
gender. Inequality regimes are maintained through how organizations are structured. High
schools, as a particular type of organization, maintain educational inequality by their admissions
processes, curricular structuring, and discipline policies. Current philanthropic and government
programs approach the high school extracurriculum as a way that marginalized groups of
students might overcome educational inequality. However, the thoughts and experiences of
young men in this project suggest that high school sports are an extension, rather than a
subversion, of a school’s inequality regime. Some young men, especially those at Park Heights
High, saw sports as a way to develop and display skills in ways unavailable to them in other
aspects of high school. Thus, their student-athlete identity was structured by broader contexts of
educational inequality. Within a high school’s inequality regime, male student-athletes creatively
enact identities in response to the challenges and opportunities present in their school.
Before exploring the thoughts and experiences of student, athletes, I began this
dissertation by looking at the outcomes associated with playing high school sports for young
men. Chapter Two showed that high school sports participation alone is not associated with
especially beneficial academic outcomes for young adult males. However, playing high school
sports in addition to participating in non-sports extracurricular activities appears to be associated
with better grades, higher graduation likelihood, and higher predicted levels of postsecondary
education, relative to non-participation. The results presented in Chapter Two show that, net
other important predictor variables, no relationship between playing sports and the likelihood of
experiencing suspension or expulsion in high school. This finding is especially curious given the
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other benefits associated with sports and non-sports participation, as well as the findings from
interviews with current student-athletes.
Chapter Three introduced three very different high schools in Los Angeles where young
men play sports, learn, and dream about their future. The data in Chapter Three describe aspects
of each school that were in place before respondents ever stepped foot on campus. Specifically, I
use interview data to describe each school’s reputation, how male student-athletes came to enroll
in each school, and what role (if any) high school sports played in this process. Foregrounding
the school context adds important nuance to the state-level survey data presented in Chapter
Two. Data from Chapter Three show that, to vary degrees, a school’s sports program can shape
how young men make decisions about high school attendance and imagine their high school
experience. The “bussers” at Pacific Coast High used sports-based social networks as a way to
find out information about the school and to successfully transfer in despite not living in the
school’s catchment zone. Student-athletes at Park Heights High, on the other hand, were hesitant
or even nervous about attending the school. However, they took comfort in the school’s rich
sports tradition. Sports did not factor into the school selection process for respondents from
College Prep. Rather, the school’s reputation for character development and college-level
academic training drew young men to this school.
After describing the unequal educational opportunities that exist across the schools in my
sample, Chapter Four explores how male student-athletes experience the academic curriculum,
social life, and punitive disciplinary systems of their respective high schools. College Prep High,
Pacific Coast High, and Park Heights High are marked by a mix of privilege and deficit,
educational resources and challenges. Within these school contexts, sports serve as identity
resources (Nasir 2011) for some young men as they navigate the inequality regimes of their
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school. Chapter Four introduced the concept of “athletic ecology” to describe how each school’s
sports program relates to other aspects of the school. Race, class, and gender influence how
young men fit into their school’s athletic ecology. At College Prep, for example, Black student-
athletes described feeling expected to excel at sports and to not be academically oriented. Thus, a
school’s athletic ecology combines with a student-athlete’s social location to shape his student-
athlete identity. High school sports participation further extended the educational privilege that
White and API respondents enjoyed at College Prep and Pacific Coast. These young men used
sports to supplement their academic experiences and to bolster their social status at school.
Academic coursework was able to remain the top priority for most White and API student-
athletes because they had ready access to college preparatory classes and saw themselves as
“good students.” Despite more frequent drinking behavior, White student-athletes at these two
high schools did not seem to suffer any stigma or punishment at school. High school sports
played a more compensatory role for Black and Latino student-athletes at all three schools.
These young men invested heavily in sports as a way to plan for their future and to mark
themselves as good students in the eyes of peers, coaches, and teachers. Finally, some
respondents had the luxury of not really caring that much about sports. Not all young men play
sports with passion. In fact, my interviews suggest that the majority of male high school student-
athletes are very casual about their participation. For these young men, sports was simply a space
to have fun, try something new, or hang out with friends.
Black respondents from College Prep enjoyed relatively greater access to academic
resources than Black student-athletes at Pacific Coast or Park Heights. However, these student-
athletes described a social life where they implicitly and explicitly were made to feel like
outsiders. Similarly, Black and Latino “bussers” from Pacific Coast felt lucky to attend the
153

desirable out-of-catchment high school, but were often relegated to lower academic tracks. Black
and Latino respondents from Park Heights were highly critical of inadequate teachers and their
non-athlete classmates that disrupted class or didn’t care about school. All three schools
presented its Black and Latino students with unique challenges to doing well in the classroom,
forming friendships with classmates, and avoiding school discipline. These young men enacted
student-athlete identities in ways that enabled them to navigate their school’s particular
inequality regime. Some Black and Latino student-athletes at Park Heights adopted a “school
captain” identity to avoid being seen as a “nobody” or a “weirdo.” This identity was especially
prominent among Park Heights baseball players, who said that their head coach encouraged them
to be leaders in the school and to
Coaches at College Prep, Pacific Coast, and Park Heights seem to be key mediators of the
high school sports experience for young men. Respondents in my project described coaches who
uniquely shaped the culture of teams, which seem to encourage certain student-athlete identities.
Future research should explore student-athlete identity formation from the point of view of the
coach and athletic director. These institutional agents are in positions to consciously impact a
school’s athletic ecology. Thus, it would be useful to explore how coaches, teachers, school
administrators, and athletic directors think about their roles in student-athletes’ lives, as well as
how these school-based adults act on those thoughts. This would provide valuable insight into
how athletic ecologies are created and maintained at the school level. Additional qualitative
research is still needed to illuminate how different school contexts enable or impede student-
athlete success.
Findings from this dissertation also raise important questions for future quantitative
researchers to take up. For instance, findings from Chapter 2 show that sports participation is not
154

significantly associated with school discipline, while my interview data suggest that student-
athletes get in trouble less often than non-athlete peers. There are several variables that would
ideally be included in future regression models that explore this relationship. These include the
number of years a respondent played sports, which sport a respondent played, and how
One of the shortcomings of my dissertation is its reliance on student-athletes to volunteer
to be interviewed. Because of this approach, I likely spoke to the more extroverted and
outspoken members of each sports team. Thus, most of the student-athlete identities that my data
describe are fairly positive, such as the “scholar-athlete” and “school captain.” A multi-site
ethnography of multiple sports teams and schools would allow future research to illuminate other
student-athlete identities that may not be as beneficial for young men to enact. For example,
what about student-athletes who hate their coaches and teammates? What about student-athletes
who are bullies or break team rules? Very few of the respondents in this project admitted to these
feelings or actions. Thus, an in-depth ethnography would help illuminate less desirable student-
athlete identities and experiences.

155

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166

APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR PACIFIC COAST AND PARK HEIGHTS
RESPONDENTS

Name of High School: _________________________
Main Type of Sport: __________________________________

1) What year are you in high school?

a. Freshman (9
th
grade)
b. Sophomore (10
th
grade)
c. Junior (11
th
grade)
d. Senior (12
th
grade)
2) Which sports have you played/are planning to play this year at your high school?
PLEASE CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY

a. Baseball
b. Basketball
c. Cross Country
d. Football
e. Golf
f. Lacrosse
g. Soccer
h. Swimming
i. Tennis
j. Track and Field
k. Wrestling
l. Other: _________________________ (please specify)
3) Have you ever received a varsity letter in a sport in high school?

a. No
b. Yes
4) Do you expect to play competitive sports at the college level (not just recreationally
or for fun)?

a. No
b. Yes
5) Other than sports, what other extracurricular activities do you participate in at
your high school (CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY)?

a. Academic clubs
167

b. Service Organizations
c. Performing Arts/Music
d. Student Council/ASB Involvement
e. None of the Above
Please circle only ONE ANSWER for the following situations. HAVE YOU EVER…

6) …been given a detention in high school? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

7) …been asked to leave class by a teacher? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

8) …been stopped or searched by a security guard? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

9) …been given a ticket by a police officer at school? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

10) …been suspended or expelled from high school? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

Please circle either YES or NO for the following questions. DURING YOUR TIME IN
HIGH SCHOOL, HAVE YOU EVER:

11) …been to a party where high school kids were drinking? NO / YES

12) ...drank alcohol? NO / YES

13) …smoked marijuana? NO / YES

14) …gotten into fights outside of school? NO / YES

15) …been arrested by the police outside of high school? NO / YES
You are both a student AND an athlete at your high school. But, on a scale from 1 to 10,
with 1 being “STUDENT” and 10 being “ATHLETE,” how would you identify yourself?
(PLEASE CIRCLE A WHOLE NUMBER)

STUDENT ATHLETE

1----------2----------3----------4----------5----------6----------7----------8----------9----------10

16) What is the highest educational degree that either your mother OR father has
obtained?
PLEASE CIRCLE ONLY ONE CHOICE

a. Less than High School
b. High School/GED
c. Some College
d. AA Degree/Technical Degree
e. BA Degree
168

f. Graduate Degree (MA/PhD/JD)

17) Are you eligible for free or reduced lunch at your high school?

a. No
b. Yes

18) What race do you consider yourself to be?

a. White
b. Black
c. Latino/Hispanic
d. Asian/Pacific Islander
e. Other: _____________________
19) What is the highest educational degree that you realistically expect to achieve?

a. Less than High School
b. High School/GED
c. Some College
d. AA Degree/Technical Degree
e. BA Degree
f. Graduate Degree (Law School, Medical School, Master’s Degree, etc.)

20) What is your cumulative high school GPA? ________________

21) How many honors or AP classes have you taken in high school? _________________

22) Do you plan on participating in this study’s one-on-one interview with Jeff to
receive a $20 gift card? IF “YES” PLEASE FILL OUT A HALF-SHEET
CONTACT FORM WITH JEFF BEFORE LEAVING!

a. Yes, please!
b. No, thank you!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME AND ATTENTION!
169

APPENDIX B
SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR COLLEGE PREP RESPONDENTS
Name of High School: _________________________
Main Type of Sport: __________________________________

1) What year are you in high school?

a. Freshman (9
th
grade)
b. Sophomore (10
th
grade)
c. Junior (11
th
grade)
d. Senior (12
th
grade)
2) Which sports have you played/are planning to play this year at your high school?
PLEASE CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY

a. Baseball
b. Basketball
c. Cross Country
d. Football
e. Golf
f. Lacrosse
g. Soccer
h. Swimming
i. Tennis
j. Track and Field
k. Wrestling
l. Other: _________________________ (please specify)
3) Have you ever received a varsity letter in a sport in high school?

a. No
b. Yes
4) Do you expect to play competitive sports at the college level (not just recreationally
or for fun)?

a. No
b. Yes
5) Other than sports, what other extracurricular activities do you participate in at
your high school (CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY)?

a. Academic clubs
b. Service Organizations
c. Performing Arts/Music
d. Student Council/ASB Involvement
170

e. None of the Above
Please circle only ONE ANSWER for the following situations. HAVE YOU EVER…

6) …been given a detention in high school? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

7) …been asked to leave class by a teacher? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

8) …been stopped or searched by a security guard? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

9) …been given a ticket by a police officer at school? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

10) …been suspended or expelled from high school? NO / YES / DON’T REMEMBER

Please circle either YES or NO for the following questions. DURING YOUR TIME IN
HIGH SCHOOL, HAVE YOU EVER:

11) …been to a party where high school kids were drinking? NO / YES

12) ...drank alcohol? NO / YES

13) …smoked marijuana? NO / YES

14) …gotten into fights outside of school? NO / YES

15) …been arrested by the police outside of high school? NO / YES

You are both a student AND an athlete at your high school. But, on a scale from 1 to 10,
with 1 being “STUDENT” and 10 being “ATHLETE,” how would you identify yourself?
(PLEASE CIRCLE A WHOLE NUMBER)

STUDENT ATHLETE

1----------2----------3----------4----------5----------6----------7----------8----------9----------10

16) What is the highest educational degree that either your mother OR father has
obtained?
PLEASE CIRCLE ONLY ONE CHOICE

a. Less than High School
b. High School/GED
c. Some College
d. AA Degree/Technical Degree
e. BA Degree
f. Graduate Degree (MA/PhD/JD)

171

17) Are you eligible for financial aid at your high school?

a. No
b. Yes

18) What race do you consider yourself to be?

a. White
b. Black
c. Latino/Hispanic
d. Asian/Pacific Islander
e. Other: _____________________

19) What is the highest educational degree that you realistically expect to achieve?

a. Less than High School
b. High School/GED
c. Some College
d. AA Degree/Technical Degree
e. BA Degree
f. Graduate Degree (Law School, Medical School, Master’s Degree, etc.)

20) What is your cumulative high school GPA? ________________

21) How many honors or AP classes have you taken in high school? _________________

22) Do you plan on participating in this study’s one-on-one interview with Jeff to
receive a $20 gift card? IF “YES” PLEASE FILL OUT A HALF-SHEET
CONTACT FORM WITH JEFF BEFORE LEAVING!

a. Yes, please!
b. No, thank you!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME AND ATTENTION!

172

APPENDIX C
FOLLOW-UP INTERVIEW PROTOCOL WITH CURRENT MALE STUDENT-ATHLETES
“Life on the Sidelines”
Jeffrey O. Sacha
Sociology Dept.
University of Southern California

First and foremost, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. My name is
Jeff and I’m a grad student at USC. My dissertation project is looking at how young men
experience playing high school sports. As a former high school athlete myself, I know that sports
can have many different impacts on young men, depending on who they, what kind of sports they
play, and the sports climate of their high school. Today I’d like to ask you a series of questions
about your own sports experience in high school and how these experiences may or may not
relate to your academic performance, social life, and experiences with punishment in high
school. Please feel free to answer these questions however you wish: THERE ARE NO RIGHT
OR WRONG ANSWERS. Also, please ask any clarifying questions that you’d like to. You have
the right to skip any questions that you don’t want to answer, as well as the right to stop the
interview whenever you’d like. For my own internal purposes, I will be recording our
conversation, but your name and identifying information will not be attached to the recording.
Everything that is shared in our interview is confidential and will not be disclosed to anybody
else. Before we begin, do you have any questions?

INTRODUCTION/HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS HISTORY
To start with, I’d like to ask you some questions about your high school sports experience:
1. What kind of athletic reputation does your high school have in general?
a. How does this athletic reputation compare with your experiences?
b. How would you characterize the specific tradition or reputation of your main
sport?
2. How did you come to play your sport at (NAME OF HS)?
a. How have these motivations changed over time?
b. Why did you decide to play this sport, as opposed to other sports, in high school?
c. What is your most vivid memory of high school sports? What makes this stand
out for you?
3. What role has your family played in your high school sports?
a. How does your family’s involvement compare with the involvement of your
teammates’ families?
b. How might your sports experience have been different without your family’s
involvement?
4. What is the hardest part about playing sports?
a. Can you describe a difficult time that you had while playing sports? How did you
deal with this adversity?
173

5. How would you describe your team’s personality?
a. Who are your teammates?
b. How do you fit into your team structure? What kind of teammate are you?
c. In what ways has your high school sports experience differed from your
teammates?
6. In general, what do you think playing sports has taught you?

OTHER EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
Great. Now, I’d like to hear about the other kinds of activities you might be involved with at your
school.

1. In general, are your teammates involved in other clubs or organizations at your school?
What about athletes from other sports at your high school?
2. Other than sports, what other clubs or organizations are you involved with at your high
school? [IF NONE, THEN SKIP TO NEXT SECTION]
a. How did you come to be involved in that/these activities?
b. Why did you get involved with that/those activities?
3. In what ways has your experience with these activities differed from your sports
experience?
4. Do you feel any more invested in these activities, as compared to sports? Why or why
not?
5. In general, how would you characterize students at your school that do not play sports?
Do they have a different experience at your high school than folks that DO play sports?

HIGH SCHOOL ACADEMICS
Ok. This next set of questions is about your academic experiences in high school.
1. What kind of academic reputation of your high school?
a. Is this reputation in-line with your experiences?
b. Overall, how would you characterize the quality of your school’s academic
training?
2. How would you describe yourself as a student?
a. What makes it hard to do well in school?
b. How do you deal with these challenges?
3. What is the highest degree that you realistically expect to achieve?
4. In general, when making decisions about your educational future (high school or college
decisions), who or where would you go for help? How come?
5. In what ways do you think that being a high school student-athlete impacts your
academics? How do your academic experiences compare to other athletes at your school?
How do they compare to non-athletes at your school?
6. If you had to pick one, would you consider yourself to be more of a student or an athlete?
a. Why do you think this is the case?
b. How would you describe your motivation level for school, as compared to sports?

SOCIAL LIFE/TEACHERS
174

Thank you. These next questions are about your group of close friends, your social status at your
high school, and your relationships with teachers at your high school.

1. I want you to think of a few of your closest friends.
a. How would you describe your group of friends?
b. How did you come to meet these friends?
2. Do you think that your group of friends would be different if you didn’t play sports?
a. IF YES; Who would you hang out with more?
b. IF YES; What kinds of things would you do with these friends?
3. How might your social life be different if you didn’t play sports?
4. How do athletes fit into the popularity structure at your high school? Are the members of
your sports team any more or less popular than other athletes at your school?
a. Are there kids at your school that want to play sports, but don't? Why don't they?
b. Do you know anybody that has been kicked off a team? What makes them
different from these young men?
c. How would you describe your own social status or reputation at your high school?
d. How much do you think the perception your peers have of you matches who you
are?
5. How would you characterize the party scene at your school?
a. How would you describe your involvement with “the scene”? Would you say that
athletes are more or less involved in the party scene at your school? Is there
variation across sports team?
6. In general, how would you describe the teachers at your high school?
a. How does your relationship to teachers compare to other students at your school?
b. How does being an athlete impact your relationship with teachers at your school?
7. Can you describe a teacher that you have felt especially close with?
a. IF YES What about this teacher makes him/her stand out?
b. IF YES How did you build a good relationship with that teacher?
c. IF YES In what ways does their class differ from other teachers?

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE/CRIMINALIZATION
Great. For these next questions, I’d like to hear your thoughts on how punishment is handled at
your school. Please feel free to use specific examples or to tell stories to answer these questions.

1. In general, how would you describe how discipline gets handled at your high school?
a. What kind of people generally get in trouble at your high school?
b. What do they get in trouble for?
2. I have heard from some guys that they feel treated unfairly at their high school because of
who they are or what they look like. How does this compare with your experience?
3. Can you describe a time in high school when you’ve gotten in trouble?
a. How did you feel the situation was handled by teachers or administrators?
4. Do you think that playing sports impacts how you are disciplined at your high school?
a. Do you think that the perception your teachers have of you matches who you are?

175

CLOSING QUESTIONS
Ok. This is the last set of questions about your overall high school experience.

1. You play ____ at _______ high. Can you think of another school where playing your
sport might be different? How do you imagine it being different?
2. Some people I speak with describe race as playing a role in their high school sports
experience. To what degree has race been present or shaped your sports experience? Do
you think that race plays a different role in other sports at your school?
3. In general, how attached do you feel to your school?
a. From your perspective, how might your high school be improved?
4. How is your high school experience different from people that don’t play sports?
5. In what ways do you think your high school experience would be different if you had
never played sports in high school?
a. How would you have filled your time?
6. What role do you see sports playing in your life after high school?

Abstract (if available)

Abstract In this dissertation, I explore how school context, race, gender, and family socioeconomic status combine to shape young men’s experiences with high school sports. I show that male student-athletes enact student-athlete identities based on how they perceive and experience opportunities in their school’s academic curriculum, social life, and disciplinary structures. Past research finds that student-athletes generally perform better than non-athlete peers (Coleman 1961

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Asset Metadata

Creator Sacha, Jeffrey O. (author)

Core Title Life on the sidelines: the academic, social, and disciplinary impacts of male high school sports participation in California

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 07/01/2016

Defense Date 05/16/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag and gender,class,Education,educational inequality,extracurricular activities,High schools,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,Sociology,Sports

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Messner, Michael A. (committee chair), Terriquez, Veronica (committee chair), Biblarz, Timothy (committee member), Huey, Stanley (committee member)

Creator Email sacha.jeff@gmail.com,sacha@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-260143

Unique identifier UC11281355

Identifier etd-SachaJeffr-4500.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-260143 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SachaJeffr-4500.pdf

Dmrecord 260143

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Sacha, Jeffrey O.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA