Unsanctioned violence in sports

The Problem

     Unsanctioned violence in sports such as women’s college soccer exists in the United States.  In 2009, a female college soccer player was caught on film violently pulling a player from the opposing team to the ground by her hair during the semifinal match of the championship tournament (Smith, 2009).  This isolated incident brought unwanted attention to both the student and her university (Smith, 2009).  This dissertation tested for significant differences between the amount of violence and aggression in women’s soccer and the number of wins, losses and ties during the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I female 2019 soccer season located in the United States.

The History

    In today’s society, Americans see violent images multiple times per day; current research shows that most media contain images of severe types of violence and aggression, such as assaults or shootings (Gross, & Mendoza, 2018).  Some of the most aggressive things that Americans sees are during sporting events (Young, 2019).  Some violence and aggression in contact sports such as football, rugby and soccer are accepted and will always be present due to the nature of the activity; when violence and aggression is not acceptable is when the acts fall outside the rules of the sport (Finn, Gardiner, & Bruijns, 2018; Kerr, 2019).  During a review of articles, Finn et al. (2018) found that college athletes exhibit higher levels of violence (violent social identity, interpersonal violence, and aggression) in their daily lives when compared to non-athlete college students; left unchecked the levels of violence will continue to grow in the college athlete population.  Kerr (2019) stated that aggression that is sanctioned by the governing body (in this case the NCAA and FIFA) falls into the norms of the sport. Unsanctioned aggression falls in the following categories: anger, power, and thrill aggression (Kerr 2019).  Anger is often retributive and often involves an immediate response to something an opposing athlete player (Kerr, 2019).  Power aggression is when a intimidates for the purpose of winning.  Thrill-based aggression is used to provoke an opponent to react with unsanctioned aggression (Kerr, 2019).  Kerr (2019) also stated that previous research that focused on male contact sports such as one that focused on male rugby player’s that participated in unsanctioned aggression.  Spaaij and Schaillée (2019) proposed that researchers, practitioners, and policymakers need to work together to understand and end unsanctioned aggression in amateur sports. 

    Colleges use championship titles to increase the number of new admission applications that a college receives (Eggers, Groothuis, & Redding, 2019); therefore, the number of titles that a soccer program has affects the quality of the overall student population.  The pressure to bring new students into the university from the staff and administration contributes to the athletes to blurring the lines of acceptable behaviors during athletic competitions (Harper & Donnor, 2017).  Overall the message from coaches is that students-athletes need to do the right thing both on and off the field; at the same time, they are saying that student-athletes need to do “whatever it takes to win.” College sports programs find themselves under the scrutiny of the media; as the visibility of the team increases, the number of ethical issues increases (Vasold et al., 2019).  The work that was completed by Spaaij and Schaillée, (2019) stated that researchers need to work to end aggression and violence in amateur sports and the research by Strand, Brotherson, and Tracy (2018) stated that as visibility on a team increases the more unethical behaviors increase.  This societal issue in higher education needs to be addressed in order to end unsanctioned violence in college women’s soccer (Young, 2019).

Significance of this Blog

    The image of a university is essential to the leadership team.  When incidents on the pitch make national media, the school needs to react in order to protect their brand.  To eliminate the need to react to such incidents, university leadership may want to consider ways to identify if their teams are aggressive and or violent as compared to the rest of the teams in the league.  Szwarc et al. (2017) stated that if further research uses data from the latest campaigns, a researcher would be able to identify the current behaviors in soccer. According to Sezen-Balçikanli and Sezen (2017), when a soccer athlete commits a foul, or a card is awarded, the offending athletes show behavior that is consistent with antisocial behaviors.  Soccer players that receive red and yellow cards show a high level of aggression while they are playing the game, then that yellow card is added to the team’s total (Mailhos, Buunk, del Arca, & Tutte, 2016).  Therefore, a researcher can use data from previous seasons (that is stored on the NCAA webpage) to answer the questions to determine if there is a significant difference in aggression between game outcomes for the NCAA Division I female soccer teams from 2019.  This research will add to the body of literature showing the current trends of aggression and violence in college women’s soccer.  The potential practical applications from this research will allow school officials to evaluate the level of aggression and violence of their teams.

    This is is first installment of a series that will look at unsanctioned violence in sports with the focus being on women's college soccer. The way that this blog is going to combat the societal issue is that it is going to give researchers, practitioners and policymakers a view of the significant differences in aggression (red and yellow card awarded) between game outcomes (wins, losses, and ties) in amateur sports, specifically in college women’s soccer, as well as enlarging the body of scholarly work by adding to the definitions of and approaches to end unsanctioned aggression and violence in amateur sports (Spaaij & Schaillée, 2019).