School versus club sport: Institutional consequences of school-centred elite sports development

This paper investigates school sports as a basic unit for the South Korean elite sport development system. Informed by new institutionalism from the field of political science that highlights institutions’ structuring power,... [ view full abstract ]

This paper investigates school sports as a basic unit for the South Korean elite sport development system. Informed by new institutionalism from the field of political science that highlights institutions’ structuring power, resultant costs and path dependency, the investigation focuses on two major institutional devices that regulate South Korean elite sports: ‘the Sports-Specialty Student System’ (SSSS) and ‘the National (Junior) Sports Festival’ (N(J)SF). Utilising a critical realist, qualitative approach that includes document analysis and interviews with policy actors within and around the educational system, this paper analyses the institutional consequences of using the school system as a legitimate path for elite sports development. The results reveal that: (1) the SSSS restricts access to elite-level competitions to school team athletes enabling them to enter upper-class schools (including university) regardless of academic performance, thus shifting responsibility for the task of developing elite sports to the educational system; and (2) the inter-city competition structure of the N(J)SF motivates the educational system to pursue sporting success by offering incentives (e.g., promotion points, special bonuses) to school supervisors, PE teachers and coaches. Consequently, the school-centred elite sports regime can easily secure a sufficient number of student-athletes through schools, and maintain a certain level of athletic performance, by winning complete commitment of student-athletes to train for sport with no concern about academic performance. However, the costs are arguably sports organisations’ limited capacity to independently recruit and foster athletes and the deprivation of balanced youth development for student-athletes. By examining the institutional conditions for South Korean school sports, this paper suggests that the school system has been established as the cradle of elite sports not only because of the costs that would otherwise have been paid by sports organisations in the under-developed Korean civil society, but because of the costs of securing unwavering athletic commitment of student-athletes.