DMS BLOG 3

Team Sports will Forever Live Strong

For fourteen years now I have played ‘the beautiful game’, Football, and been apart of many different teams and communities. I have attended three different schools and one university in both England and Australia.  As well as also being apart of many different social groups along with other sporting teams and educational communities. The point I am trying to make here is that no matter, what you’ve done, where you’ve done it or even if you know you have done it, you have been apart of, or you still are apart of a community.

You see traditionally a community has been described as a group of interacting people living in a common location, with organized and shared values, attitudes and beliefs.  (Community, 2010)

Two gentlemen by the name of D.W Mcmillan and D.M Chavis (1987) first adopted the idea of community and what it meant to be apart of one. They developed research into what is referred to as the ‘sense of a community’. Their research identified four elements of “sense of community”:

o   Feeling of Membership: Whereby members attend regularly, learn any special terminology, rules and behaviour norms

o   Feeling of Influence: Members gain status through regular attendance and share as well as enforce the rules

o   Fulfilment of Needs: Whereby members are offered support when needed and a place to communicate through the ups and downs in life

o   Shared Emotion: Members embody a sense of group ‘history’ & ‘spirit’

Van Vilet & Burgers (1987) (Brand, 2010)suggested that communities contain: social interaction, a shared value system and a shared symbol system in four realms:

o   Social: Encompasses social interaction and solidarity for both individual and institutional relations

o   Political: Collective formation of goals and the implementation of policy

o   Economic: Involves the production, distribution and consumptions of goods and services

o   Cultural: The shared value and symbols systems, also corresponding to the built environment

These beliefs were founded and shared amongst the global community in 1987, when the internet and similar communication devices had not yet been established. However, this traditional sense of community is no longer the only form, with geographic location (common location as referred to above) no longer being a determining factor amongst instilling a sense of community throughout social interactions. Virtual communities have taken the world by storm, throughout the past decade, with establishments such as Myspace and more recently Facebook crossing the geographical, political, economic and cultural boundaries, to connect communities in an entirely different way.

 All four of these realms are now readily accessible and available to be fulfilled online, with the game World of Warcraft being the perfect example of a virtual community. To me, that is what the word community means to my planned profession. Will it ever change you may ask? I don’t believe so. There will always be a desire for people to play team sports. For people to want to be amongst a community such as sporting team, whereby like minded individuals are out there all trying to achieve the same goals and ambitions. It is those similar goals and ambitions that I believe will continue to drive the sense of a community throughout sporting teams.

o   Social: Allows individual and group chat, as well as encouraging group formation and membership

o   Political: Allows and encourages rule development among communities as well as a certain amount of ability to enforce those rules

o   Economic: Players are encouraged to purchase and trade items with other players

o   Cultural:  The environment and classes‘ of characters played results in shared symbolic systems and understanding of things. (Brand, 2010)

Since 1987, when Van Vilet and Burgers first suggested the idea of four realms within a community, (Brand, 2010) society has evolved at a rapid pace and so the ideas of traditional communities whereby face –to- face interaction was compulsory have somewhat subsided. Being bound by location and time restraints, were major contributing factors into the depth of the community. Nowadays online communities are not bounded by time or space with asynchronous communication easily accessible.

As a professional footballer the term community is an essential part of your everyday life. You are apart of a team, and it is that team that you train with everyday, twice a day. It is those members of your team, your community, that you step out onto the playing field with, every game. In team sports, not just one person can win the game, it takes the effort of all members of that community. Each member has to be driven by the same goals and beliefs. They have to feel apart of the community as discussed by (McMillan & Chavis, 1987)and feel as though that community will be there for them, through the good and the bad.

References

Brand, J. (2010). Restructuring Community . Digital Media and Society .

Community. (2010, November 14). Retrieved November 22, 2010, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community

McMillan, D., & Chavis, D. (1987). Sense of community: A definition and theory. 16.