Sports

On June 6, 1939, youngsters who loved to hit a ball and run some bases played the first Little League baseball game at Park Point in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Today, what began as a three-team organization has grown into Little League^® International (LLI) – spreading across the United States and into 100 countries, involving nearly 1.5 million adult volunteers committed to helping young Little League players develop athletic skills alongside concepts of character and loyalty.

Despite its world-famous work and engagement of volunteers, there has been little exchange between LLI and the volunteer management field. In this Voices, Lori Renner Larsson sets out to fill this void with her review of Little League volunteers, answering questions about their structure and how they are coordinated while sharing insights about the lasting appeal of volunteering around children and baseball.

Bicycles? In a journal about volunteering? Of course! As pedal-powered transportation continues to gain popularity in urban centers throughout the world, long-distance cyclist Tristan Dahn (who also happens to be on the Energize, Inc. staff) takes a look at the many volunteer activities surrounding this two-wheeled trend. While all are interesting as projects, some activities have elements applicable to any sort of volunteer management. For instance, how can your organization benefit from the outreach strategies used by “bicycle ambassador” programs? Might your organization engage with a broad cross-section of your community the way that many volunteer-led bicycle safety, instruction and maintenance programs do? In this Along the Web, Dahn connects the two-wheeler to the world of volunteering. 

When it comes to professional football in America, most people associate “special teams” with players who take the field for kick-offs, punt returns and kicking an extra point. But for the Miami Dolphins, an American football team based in Florida, “special teams” means so much more. The Miami Dolphins Special Teams, Driven by Chevy, is a new volunteer program that serves as one of the cornerstones of the Miami Dolphins Foundation. Although not the first volunteer initiative in professional sports, it is the first and only full-time volunteer program operated by a professional sports team. Started in 2009, the program is specifically designed to engage episodic volunteers in community service using the unique incentives and branding only available to a professional sports team.  To date, the program has attracted 3,204 volunteers who have logged 43,835 hours of community service.

In this feature story for e-Volunteerism, Leslie Nixon, the Manager of Volunteer Programs for the Miami Dolphins, takes readers behind the scenes to show a business model of volunteerism from a decidedly unique perspective. Whether you’re a football fan or not, this story will give you a new way to think about volunteer opportunities.

If you watched the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, you no doubt recall the “blue jackets” – the 25,000 passionate, talented and dedicated members of the Olympic volunteer team who worked at every event and venue leading up to, during and following the Games. In this e-Volunteerism feature, Olympic volunteer Olga Pazukha takes us behind the scenes at the Olympics in Vancouver and describes what it’s like to volunteer at one of the largest and most-watched events in the world. Pazukha shares her enthusiasm about her volunteer experiences and also casts a critical eye on what can be learned from the things that needed improvement.

Surveys in different countries show that people often choose to volunteer in the sport and recreation field.  During 2006, Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC) commissioned research to look at how to motivate and recruit more volunteers, and successive SPARC studies show how important volunteers are to sport in New Zealand. This edition of Research to Practice considers how this detailed research can be applied across all volunteer-involving organisations.

In December 2005, an assault on three volunteer surf lifesavers led to violence and what are now known as 'the Cronulla riots.'  In the aftermath of these events, a number of parties (including the Australian Government, Sutherland Shire Council, Surf Life Saving Australia, Surf Life Saving NSW, and various other groups) representing Muslims proposed a program which would attempt to bring harmony back to the Cronulla beaches. Ultimately, this program has seen almost 20 young people of mainly Lebanese Muslim background undergo the arduous training to become volunteer surf lifesavers. But is this mere tokenism or a genuine attempt by those involved to make a difference?

With the world’s largest sporting event, the FIFA World Cup, recently winding up in Germany, we at e-Volunteerism decided it was time to turn our attention to the nuances involved in volunteering and volunteer management practices within the context of hosting major events.

Major events utilize the support of thousands of volunteers which, by sheer weight of numbers, creates management complexities not experienced by volunteer managers working in more conventional kinds of volunteering.   Some of these issues, which we discuss in this Roundtable, include:

• Infrastructure and planning required for handling such a vast workforce
• Transference of volunteers, skills and knowledge across nations
• Pressures of working to complex and finite time lines
• Importance of reward and recognition of major event volunteers
• Utilization of volunteers themselves in the management and training of other volunteer team members

This Keyboard Roundtable offers a variety of opinions from volunteerism leaders around the world, involved in coordinating volunteer effort across a wide range of major events. We invite you to learn about this unique style of volunteer involvement from their experiences.

Volunteers have always been the backbone of sports, leisure and recreation programs, so we decided to do a quick round-up of Web resources in this area. What follows is a mix of things:

• research studies and articles
• forms and policies
• workbooks and manuals

And just for fun we threw in a bunch of stuff about volunteering for the Olympic Games, which is becoming a social phenomenon all in itself.