Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Young athletes value their social relations in sports, and these social relations can have consequences when it comes to joining, continuing, and quitting sports.
Yet the important question of how social relations in sports develop has not yet been adequately answered. A total of athletes aged 16—19 from 30 Norwegian sports groups completed a survey on electronic tablets. We asked how social relations in leisure, school, and social media—through the social mechanisms of contact, homophily, and contagion—influenced social relations in sports.
We also controlled for the effect of exercise frequency and duration years of contact in sports. Exponential random graph modelling ERGM analyses showed that first and foremost, relations from social media and leisure, but also school networks and exercise frequency, influence sports networks. This study shows that social relations in sports are diverse and depend on social relations outside sports. Keywords: social networks, friends, youth, sports, school, leisure, social media. There are also several studies on what these social relations look like [ 6 , 7 ] and the consequences of the qualities of social relations in sports.
Research shows that social relations matter for how sports are experienced fun and enjoyment [ 8 ], feelings of belonging and integration [ 9 , 10 , 11 ], social capital [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ], health and lifestyle [ 16 , 17 ] and the levels of participation in and dropping out from sports [ 4 , 18 , 19 , 20 ].
We argue that this observation is also valid for sports studies, and accordingly, in the current study, we investigate the consequential issue of how the often-praised social relations in youth sports develop. Studies from various social and organizational fields have shown that recruitment to, participation in, and attrition from organized activities are not primarily about individual characteristics and motives but are first and foremost about social networks and opportunities for action.
