An empirical analysis of attendance factors relating to the female sports market

Although approximately seven million Australians attended sporting events in 2002, male spectators outnumbered female spectators by 25 percent (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2003). This study investigates the reasons for this difference by analysing a survey of 175 female sporting event attendees. The findings show that female attendance motivations are different for different sporting events, for example, football, horse racing and tennis. A number of other factors that were also found to influence attendance amongst the female market are explained and discussed and implications for sports venue managers are presented.

Sports training, science and class among British amateur athletes in the mid to late nineteenth century

Organised amateur sports emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper, an exercise in historical sociology, analyses how a new system of sports training was devised by the amateurs to meet their particular needs. The data comes from contemporary British training manuals and the analysis is informed by the theories of Bourdieu and Foucault. That amateurs came from the higher social classes was highly
significant: it meant that they could not adopt existing training practices because these were associated with plebeian professional athletes. For amateurs to have followed the preparation of the professionals would have placed their bodies under the control of a social inferior and promoted a somatic shape more in keeping with the lower than with
the higher social orders. Mirroring the social distance between them, amateurs came to stridently reject professional training practices. Instead, they devised new training techniques which were justified through recourse to contemporary bio-medical knowledge. It is argued that amateur training originated for social reasons, with the proponents’ class positions and social capital facilitating the evocation of scientific knowledge as a legitimating ideology.

Isn't sport taxing? The taxation of sports professionals post-Agassi

In Agassi v Robinson (Her Majestyʹs Inspector of Taxes), a majority of the House of Lords found that payments under two sponsorship contracts between a company owned and controlled by Mr Andre Agassi, (Agassi Enterprises Inc) and Nike Inc and Head Sport AG were assessable under UK tax law. This was so despite (i) none of the parties to the contracts was resident, nor domiciled, in the United Kingdom and (ii) none of the payer companies conducted business, directly or indirectly, through branches/agencies in the United Kingdom. The article considers whether the Australian Taxation Office could similarly assess non‐resident sports‐persons, like Mr Agassi, personally, and/or entities they control, on payments made under sponsorship agreements with a company such as Nike Inc. While the preferable view is that such payments are not sourced in Australia, Australian source rules are so ill defined that there is some basis for asserting such payments are sourced in Australia.

Promoting comprehensive sun protection policies and practices in outdoor sports: a qualitative study of perceived priorities and practicalities

Sun protection policies, environments, practices, and attitudes in sporting club contexts might be significant determinants of sun exposure among adult sporting participants. Face-to-face interviews, using standardised, open-ended questions were conducted with 20 club officials from four sports: soccer, hockey, tennis and surf lifesaving. Thematic content analysis identified a number of salient themes. Formal sun protection policies were well-implemented in surf lifesaving, but less so in soccer, hockey and tennis clubs, which often had informal sun protection practices in place. Officials perceived sun protection to be important, which was related to perceived exposure levels, the type of sport, length of time played and the season. Consistent logistical and practical considerations emerged, including limited resources, availability of shade, and lack of control over sporting facilities, uniform regulations and games scheduling. Sun protection efforts often focused on children more than adult players. Reciprocal responsibility was an important theme, where it was perceived that responsibility for sun protection should be equally shared between the club and the member. In this study it was found that reciprocal responsibility, duty of care and sport-specific practical requirements might significantly influence the success of policy, environmental and education initiatives for sun protection in sporting settings.

Rural sports and recreational injuries in Australia: what do we know?

Objective: It is widely recognised that individuals residing in regional or rural areas have poorer health outcomes than those from metropolitan areas. Factors associated with these poorer health outcomes include geographical isolation, population declines, limited health care provision and higher levels of inactivity compared to urban areas. The mental, social and physical health of individuals and communities in rural areas can be improved through active participation in sport and recreation activities. Unfortunately, participation in such activities can potentially lead to injury. There is a suggestion that there is an increased risk of sports injuries in rural areas due to the lack of health professionals and coaching personnel, fewer available volunteers to organise and deliver sport, and the general attitude towards injuries in rural settings.

Results: There is very limited information about the number and types of injuries sustained during participation in sports activities in rural and regional settings. This is largely related to a lack of formal sporting structures and support mechanisms including research funding and trained personnel.

Conclusion: A range of factors need to be implemented to improve safety for sporting and recreational participants in these areas. These include improved monitoring of injury occurrence, stronger promotion of safety initiatives and wider implementation of education strategies.

Multi-level semantic analysis for sports video

There has been a huge increase in the utilization of video as one of the most preferred type of media due to its content richness for many significant applications including sports. To sustain an ongoing rapid growth of sports video, there is an emerging demand for a sophisticated content-based indexing system. Users recall video contents in a high-level abstraction while video is generally stored as an arbitrary sequence of audio-visual tracks. To bridge this gap, this paper will demonstrate the use of domain knowledge and characteristics to design the extraction of high-level concepts directly from audio-visual features. In particular, we propose a multi-level semantic analysis framework to optimize the sharing of domain characteristics.

What do we mean by the term "inflammation"? A contemporary basic science update for sports medicine

Most practicing sports medicine clinicians refer to the concept of "inflammation" many times a day when diagnosing and treating acute and overuse injuries. What is meant by this term? Is it a "good" or a "bad" process? The major advances in the understanding of inflammation in recent years are summarised, and some clinical implications of the contemporary model of inflammation are highlighted.

Prevalence of health promotion policies in sports clubs in Victoria, Australia

In recent years, some health agencies offered sponsorship to sporting associations to promote healthy environments by encouraging clubs to develop health-related policies. However, the extent to which these sponsorship contracts reach their stated aims is of concern. This study aimed to quantify levels of policy development and practice in sports clubs for each of five key health areas, namely smoke-free facilities, sun protection, healthy catering, responsible serving of alcohol and sports injury prevention. Representatives from 932 Victorian sports clubs were contacted by telephone with 640 clubs (69%) participating in the survey. Results suggested that the establishment of written policies on the key health areas by sports clubs varied widely by affiliated sport and health area: 70% of all clubs with bar facilities had written policies on responsible serving of alcohol, ranging from 58% of tennis clubs to 100% of diving and surfing clubs. In contrast, approximately one-third of sports clubs had a smoke-free policy, with 36% of tennis, 28% of country football and 28% of men's cricket clubs having policy. Moreover, 34% of clubs overall had established sun protection policy, whereas clubs competing outside during summer months, [diving (86%) and life-saving (81%)] were most likely to have a written sun protection policy. Injury prevention policies were established in 30% of sports clubs, and were most common among football (56%), diving (43%) and life-saving (41%). This study suggests that policy development for health promotion can be achieved in sports clubs when it is well supported by health agencies and consideration is given to the appropriateness of the specific behaviours to be encouraged for a given sport. Communication between associations and clubs needs to be monitored by health agencies to ensure support and resources for policy development to reach the club level.

Sports events and the female market : an investigation of attendance motivations

Over the last five years, attendance at sports events in Australia has grown at a rate of 13%; however, male spectators outnumber female spectators by 25% (ABS 2003). Drawing on a sample of 175 female respondents from the city and suburbs of Melbourne, this study identifies and explores the factors that motivate their attendance at sports events. The results show that social dimensions as well as on site entertainment can have a strong influence in attracting a female audience and that omen will
not attend if the facilities provided are not of a high standard.

The body, mind and soul of AFL footballers: tales of identity from the global sports entertainment industry

The paper discusses some of the findings of a research project funded by the Australian Football League (AFL) titled: Getting the Balance Right: Professionalism, Performance, Prudentialism and Playstations in the Life of AFL Footballers. The research explored the emergence and evolution of a professional identity for AFL footballers – an identity that has many facets including the ideas that a professional leads a balanced life, and has a prudent orientation to the future, to life after football. The AFL is a high profile, sports entertainment business in which brand relationships between the industry and its sponsors generate substantial income for the League, for Clubs, and for Coaches and players. In addition the AFL’s equalisation policies tightly regulate the ways in which Clubs can recruit, maintain and develop playing lists. In this context various tools of analysis are used to identify and characterise the particular Body, Mind and Soul elements of the young men who might be recruited to a Club; who might have significant time, money and effort invested in their development (as players, as persons); who might develop an identity as an AFL footballer. Drawing on Foucault’s work on the care of the self we argue that in this situation, narratives of identity necessarily involve a struggle for the Body, Mind and Soul of these young men.

Towards universal and statistical-driven heuristics for automatic classification of sports video events

Researchers worldwide have been actively seeking for the most robust and powerful solutions to detect and classify key events (or highlights) in various sports domains. Most approaches have employed manual heuristics that model the typical pattern of audio-visual features within particular sport events To avoid manual observation and knowledge, machine-learning can be used as an alternative approach. To bridge the gaps between these two alternatives, an attempt is made to integrate statistics into heuristic models during highlight detection in our investigation. The models can be designed with a modest amount of domain-knowledge, making them less subjective and more robust for different sports. We have also successfully used a universal scope of detection and a standard set of features that can be applied for different sports that include soccer, basketball and Australian football. An experiment on a large dataset of sport videos, with a total of around 15 hours, has demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of our
aIlgorithms.

Extensible detection and indexing of highlight events in broadcasted sports video

Content-based indexing is fundamental to support and sustain the ongoing growth of broadcasted sports video. The main challenge is to design extensible frameworks to detect and index highlight events. This paper presents: 1) A statistical-driven event detection approach that utilizes a minimum amount of manual knowledge and is based on a universal scope-of-detection and audio-visual features; 2) A semi-schema-based indexing that combines the benefits of schema-based modeling to ensure that the video indexes are valid at all time without manual checking, and schema-less modeling to allow several passes of instantiation in which additional elements can be declared. To demonstrate the performance of the events detection, a large dataset of sport videos with a total of around 15 hours including soccer, basketball and Australian football is used.

Using decision-tree to automatically construct learned-heuristics for events classification in sports video

Automatic events classification is an essential requirement for constructing an effective sports video summary. It has become a well-known theory that the high-level semantics in sport video can be “computationally interpreted” based on the occurrences of specific audio and visual features which can be extracted automatically. State-of-the-art solutions for features-based event classification have only relied on either manual-knowledge based heuristics or machine learning. To bridge the gaps, we have successfully combined the two approaches by using learning-based heuristics. The heuristics are constructed automatically using decision tree while manual supervision is only required to check the features and highlight contained in each training segment. Thus, fully automated construction of classification system for sports video events has been achieved. A comprehensive experiment on 10 hours video dataset, with five full-match soccer and five full-match basketball videos, has demonstrated the effectiveness/robustness of our algorithms.