Experiential learning has become a driving force of universities around the world, and is a crucial part of many sport management programs. This is particularly true given the competitive nature of the field and the rapid changes the industry continuously faces. This work seeks to reexamine the sport management curricula to ensure a progression and evolution toward a superior level of student preparedness for their internship experiences. Through the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods, our major findings recommend a focus on academic, experiential, and professional development. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed along with limitations and directions for further investigation.

This article explores questions of reflexivity, positionality, identity, and emotion within the process of ethnographic research. We reflect on our feelings of privilege and guilt in and through our ethnographic fieldwork and discuss the ways in which these experiences encouraged reflexive thinking and a crucial interrogation of the place of the self in the research process. Specifically, we construct individual vignettes centered on our differing research efforts to acknowledge that our work is unavoidably personal and to embrace the myriad ways in which our positionality impacted our findings. We conclude by offering insights into the ways in which our field experiences are important in the production of knowledge, both in our own work and more generally.

According to cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, social class is defined by the interplay and operation of various forms of capital, within the set of durable and objective relations in which the classed subject is located. Informed by Bourdieu's understanding of social class, this article details the empirical dimensions of upper‐middle‐class familial involvement at the Valley View Swim and Tennis Club. An institution prefigured on the practice and development of important physical skills, Valley View represents a site for the complex interplay of capitals (economic, social, cultural, and physical) complicit in the preservation and reproduction of members' upper‐middle‐class habitus, and corresponding elevated and privileged social status. Specifically, we discuss the findings of ethnographic fieldwork focused on the acquisition, transmission, and conversion of economic, social, cultural, and physical capital in and through member families' club involvement. We argue that Valley View operates as a distinctive cultural field, wherein embodied techniques and expressions of class‐based power and privilege contribute to the reproduction of social class differences, boundaries, and hierarchies, in such a way as to render them natural, and largely unacknowledged, effects of being.

Experiential learning promotes the development of a variety of skill competencies that will better prepare sport management students to enter the industry. In order to maximize opportunities for experiential learning, many sport management curricula incorporate applied coursework options in addition to internships, because the classroom serves as an important conduit for preprofessional learning in which faculty can both supervise and mentor students. It has become increasingly important to delineate the pedagogical and professional value of students’ experience of applied learning, because more programs have integrated these types of experiences into coursework; however, there has been limited research exploring this topic. Anchored in qualitative-data collection with students enrolled in four different applied courses, this research identifies three themes—curricular freedom, skill development, and relationship building—that highlight the categorical benefits and nuanced mechanisms through which knowledge is transferred in and through applied coursework.

No abstract