Dreaming of Beijing : experiencing the changing landscape of elite women's soccer in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On April 9, 2008 the Canadian women’s soccer national team secured its first berth into the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Despite this great accomplishment, since its formation in July 1986 Team Canada has struggled to develop and maintain consistency at the international level. Furthermore, although soccer is currently the “game of choice” for young girls and women at the recreational level in Canada, there has been little support for women’s professional development in Canada (Hall, 2004). Despite this limited support, however, a number of changes have taken place in recent years in an attempt to elevate the landscape of elite women’s soccer in Canada. More specifically, in 1999, the Canadian Soccer Association hired a full-time international head coach for the women’s national program. In February 2006, the Vancouver Whitecaps FC also hired a full-time head coach for its amateur senior women’s team. These fully-funded positions provided critical human and financial resources for the development of elite women’s soccer. My research objectives are two-fold; first, I construct a chronological account of the development of elite women’s soccer in Canada focusing primarily on some major changes that occurred in 2006. Second, I examine how these changes have impacted the experiences and attitudes of female players and staff members involved in elite women’s soccer in Canada. In-depth interviews were conducted with two sample groups (players and staff) drawn from the 2006 Whitecaps FC women’s team and the Canadian women’s national team. In general, participants from both groups expressed overwhelming support for the changes that took place, however deeper readings of the data revealed more complex themes and troubling issues such as the level of sacrifices players were forced to make in their personal lives and their sense of losing levels of control over their playing careers. This research will complement an increasing focus on the socio-historical development of women’s soccer globally and its effects upon players and coaches (Hall, 2004; Williams, 2003). More importantly, the findings will add to existing literature by offering a critical examination of how the professionalization of women’s sport impacts the lives and experiences of elite female athletes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".