Volunteering in Sport

Volunteering in sport exists in many ways. It can span short-term commitment in an event to lifelong obligations in a sport club: from doing sausage sizzle on a Sunday to being President in the sports club; from engaging in a sport organisation where no other in the family is engaged to be a part of coaching teams for your kids; and from being engaged in playful football with small kids to supporting semi- to fully professional teams as a groundman or a team manager. Perhaps because volunteering in sport has so many different faces, it is often argued to be a prerequisite for sport to exist. “No volunteers – no sport” seems sometimes to be the argument. While sport does exist without volunteers involved, we agree that volunteers in many ways are an important part of creating possibilities for sport. In this chapter, we will discuss why volunteering is important for sports clubs, how volunteering can be understood, and which contextual factors seem to influence the scope and scale of volunteering in sport in different contexts, including the national context and the organisational context. Based on the analysis, the future of volunteer work in sports is subsequently discussed.