Re-imagining mothers exercising leadership in sport management

Despite the increase in women’s sport participation, sport management’s organizational structures are not built to accommodate women in leadership positions. Mothers, specifically, may have difficulty obtaining leadership positions because narratives of being the ideal employee and intensive mothering are inherently contradictory but critical for “success” in both spaces. Yet little sport management research has considered exercising leadership as an alternative to positional leadership, and even less research has explored this concept from the perspective of mothers as leaders, although mothers continually exercise leadership through sport participation and resistance without conforming to traditional positional leadership standards. Therefore, in this chapter, we challenged dominant conceptualizations of positional leadership by exploring how mothers exercise leadership through community sport participation. Drawing examples from two qualitative studies critically examining mothers’ community sport participation, we use gender and transformative justice frameworks to unpack how mothers exercise leadership as they engage in sport while resisting intensive mothering.