From the Outdoor Rink to Development Inc.: Parent, Coach, and Director Navigation of Player Development in the Prolympic Field of Independent Youth Hockey

This dissertation examines how prolympic pressures influence the experience of parents, coaches, and directors in the field of independent youth hockey in Alberta. Formed from seeds of dissatisfaction with traditional minor hockey environments, independent youth hockey was created so youth hockey players could pursue competitive goals with greater intensity. Increased professionalization and commercialization contributed to the alignment of independent youth hockey with the concept of prolympism (Donnelly, 1996). Despite a growing body of research on the commercialization of youth sport, little attention has been paid to prolympism or to the rise of independent hockey in Canada and how its organizational, cultural, and economic logics reshape the lived experiences of key stakeholders. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate how prolympic pressures (Ingham et al., 2002) are embedded within, and reproduced through, independent hockey in Alberta. Guided by a critical orientation, the primary research question was: How do parents, coaches, and directors navigate and negotiate their participation in a prolympic field of hockey player development? To address this question, the study draws on Bourdieu’s sociological concepts of field, doxa, habitus, and capital, along with Lareau’s (2002) ‘concerted cultivation’ and Brown’s (2015) description of ‘homo economicus,’ to critically interrogate how prolympic structural and cultural forces shape the pursuit of development for major stakeholders in Alberta youth hockey. A qualitative design was employed, including semi-structured interviews with eleven directors, six coaches, and twelve parents, as well as practice and game observations of teams competing in independent youth hockey leagues in Alberta. This design enabled a comprehensive exploration of how dominant values, beliefs, and practices sustain prolympic ideals of elite performance, heightened competition, and widespread commercialization in independent youth hockey. The analysis highlights the tensions between parental aspirations, coaching practices, organizational priorities, and the prolympic qualities that continue to reproduce inequities in youth sport. Findings reveal how prolympic ideals are generally accepted as stakeholders pursue intense competitive goals (Hughes & Coakley, 1991) in the field of independent youth hockey. Parents were required to navigate tensions between fostering their children’s enjoyment of the game and tolerating the increasing demands of performance-oriented development pathways. Coaches described competitiveness, freedom, and choice as benefits of independent youth hockey, but these neoliberal elite-oriented values often constrained their ability to focus on developmental goals. Directors highlighted the value and efficiency of their programming, acknowledging the expectations of competitive stakeholders and offering few solutions to balance goals of inclusive participation. This study makes two major theoretical contributions. First, it extends Bourdieu’s framework of field, doxa, habitus, and capital by demonstrating how these concepts operate within the emerging and underexplored context of independent youth hockey. Second, it advances understanding of how stakeholders navigate the prolympic field by extending Lareau’s concept of concerted cultivation and applying Brown’s framing of homo economicus to show how directors adopt practices that position youth athletes within this prolympic system. Empirically, this research offers one of the first sociological examinations of independent hockey in Canada, documenting how commercialization, competition, and elite-oriented values become normalized by stakeholders. Practically, it highlights the structural and cultural mechanisms that reinforce barriers to equitable participation in youth sport, providing evidence for policymakers, sport organizations, and educators who seek to design more inclusive models of development. In sum, this dissertation addresses a significant gap in the sociology of youth sport by providing an empirically rich, theoretically-grounded analysis of independent youth hockey in Alberta. It demonstrates how social, cultural, and economic forces intersect to enable opportunities and reproduce barriers, offering important implications for theory, practice, and policy in Canadian sport.

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