Kickin it in the Hood: Soccer and Social Inclusion in Global Toronto


Greg Yerashotis, Trent University

This presentation will lay out the findings of my doctoral research that I completed while enrolled at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Sport Policy Studies. Using immersive ethnographic methods, my dissertation chronicled my involvement in sport-based youth development initiatives from 2014-2020. Here I took on the role of a community soccer coach to better investigate if, how and why sport programming was affecting the integration experiences of marginalized youth living in urban Toronto’s marquee immigrant reception site—the neighbourhood of St. James Town. Sitting at the literal and symbolic heart of Canada’s ‘global city,’ St. James Town is colloquially known as the world in a block due to its vast range of ethno-cultural diversity and extreme population density. It stands as the last remaining immigrant settlement site in a rapidly gentrifying urban core, with newly constructed ‘mega-towers’ of higher rental income units now dwarfing this once proud constellation of high-rise buildings. Using this avowedly intersectional community context as a background, the author tells the story of how local immigrant youth used sport in nuanced ways to construct unique senses of inclusion and forms of belonging in a rapidly changing and increasingly globalized world. The central questions the project seeks to answer are: Did sport participation affect the everyday integration experiences of these youth? If so, how, and why? And how were these experiences unique for different genders? Upon the answering of these questions, a theory of social inclusion through sport is put forth based on programming’s ability to engage and develop local youth, while also facilitating group bonding and eclectic forms of belonging in their lives. There are three pillars of this theory that will be explored in greater detail within this presentation. First, sport’s engagement capacity in the lives of marginalized immigrants. In the foreground of this argument are adolescent boys’ experiences of ‘sport-based urban belonging,’ that resulted from their ongoing involvement in ethno-culturally diverse recreational programs. Participants described in interviews how the program served as a space for ‘trans-cultural’ learning, which they believed aided in their acculturation because they saw these multi-cultural social relations as representative of the dynamics of the ‘global’ city of Toronto more generally. However, despite the global and domestic aspects of this process of ‘making home,’ the manner in which it was tied to the hyper-diversity of their locality meant that this kind of belonging was essentially urban . Second, in addition to the book’s focus on teenage boys, a standout feature of the research underpinning this proposal is its comparative analysis on gendered sporting relations in the community context. Here, the deep level of immersion achieved by the researcher into local neighbourhood life revealed intersectional barriers to sporting access faced by young women locally. Following the implementation of a girls-only soccer program by the author, however, local girls reported experiencing uniquely empowering affects from participation, which were found on both individual and collective levels. Third, following a detailed analysis of the separate sporting experiences of boys and girls, the author documents how soccer eventually bridged gendered divides, and facilitated a neighbourhood-based, cross-gendered, and multi-generational soccer community, termed the ‘Wellesley-Jarvis Soccer Tribe.’ Therefore, not only did access to, engagement with, and ongoing participation in this inter-sectoral program partnership positively influence youth on individual levels; but out of the collaboration grew a semi-autonomous network of soccer players whose bonds transcended the physical activity spaces where they were originally cultivated. There are clear linkages between conference themes and the focus of this research. Primarily, the expansion of the conference’s understanding of sustainability beyond just environmentalism, and to incorporate the idea of shared and global sustainable futures. This leaves space for research that highlights meaningful strategies to battle against structural forces of marginalization, and in this case, present strategies to better facilitate the inclusion of racialized groups in ‘global cities’ and multicultural societies like Toronto, Canada. I have recently submitted this research in the form of a book proposal in Palgrave Macmillan’s Sport and Global Culture series, and look forward to using this conference as a platform to further refine my findings for an academic audience.

This paper will be presented at the following session: