Numerous international high-profile cases of athlete abuses have led to efforts to advance what has been termed “Safe Sport.” Sport and coaching organisations are urgently designing and implementing policies, procedures and programmes to advance a culture of safe sport. However, we posit that these endeavours are occurring without a conceptual framework about what constitutes safe sport or how to achieve it. Without a consistent conceptual framework for safe sport, prevention and intervention initiatives may not be fully realised. As such, the purpose of the study was to explore sport administrators' perspectives of how to advance safe sport. Given the leadership positions sport administrators hold, understanding their perspectives may be helpful in informing a framework to guide the development and implementation of safe sport strategies. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 sport administrators from different sport and coaching organisations to elicit views on how best to advance safe sport. The findings indicated that a multi-faceted approach embracing multiple advancement strategies was reportedly essential for progressing safe sport. Specifically, the sport administrators recommended that sport organisations establish a universal framework of safe sport, design and implement education, implement and enforce policies, establish independent monitoring and complaint mechanisms and conduct research to ensure that advancement strategies are current and applicable. The participants suggested that these advancement strategies are necessary to evolve sport from a culture that embraces hegemonic masculine narratives, interpersonal violence and controlling coach–athlete relationships, to a culture of sport that extends the safe sport focus beyond the prevention of harm to the promotion of positive values and human rights. The findings were interpreted through a safeguarding lens to propose a framework for achieving safeguarding sport, defined by the prevention of harm and the promotion of positive values in sport.

There is a growing concern that the voices of athletes, and in particular, athletes from equity-deserving groups, are unaccounted for in the development and advancement of Safe Sport initiatives. The lack of consideration of the needs and experiences of diverse groups is concerning, given the existing literature outside the context of sport indicating that equity-deserving individuals experience more violence. As such, the following study sought to understand how equity-deserving athletes interpret and experience Safe Sport. Grounded within an interpretive phenomenological analysis, semi-structured interviews were used to understand how athletes with marginalised identities conceptualise and experience Safe Sport. Seven participants, including two Black male athletes, two White, gay male athletes, one Middle Eastern female athlete, one White, female athlete with a physical disability and one White, non-binary, queer, athlete with a physical disability, were asked to conceptualise and describe their experiences of Safe Sport. The findings revealed these athletes perceived Safe Sport as an unrealistic and unattainable ideal that cannot fully be experienced by those from equity-deserving groups. This interpretation was reinforced by reported experiences of discriminatory comments, discriminatory behaviours and systemic barriers, perpetrated by coaches, teammates, and resulting from structural aspects of sport. The findings draw on the human rights literature to suggest integrating principles of equity, diversity and inclusion are fundamental to safeguarding equity-deserving athletes.

In response to numerous highly publicized cases of athlete maltreatment, sport organizations have developed prevention and intervention strategies under the umbrella term of Safe Sport; however, confusion exists about what it does and does not encompass. To better understand what Safe Sport encompasses, this study sought to develop a conceptual framework of Safe Sport, informed by the perspectives of various stakeholders in sport. Using a social constructivist grounded theory approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with forty-one participants, including athletes, coaches, sport administrators, and researchers. The results are interpreted to suggest that participants’ understanding of Safe Sport are informed by three overarching themes: environmental and physical safety, relational safety, and optimising sport, all of which are viewed as continuously evolving relative to the ever-changing context of sport and broader society. Recommendations are made to optimise sport experiences and thus prevent physical and psychological harms through a safeguarding approach that prioritizes the promotion of human rights.

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Despite a significant number of coaches pursuing formal coach training through the National Coaching Certification Program in Canada each year, very few complete the entire certification process. The purpose of this study was to investigate the barriers and facilitators that influence Canadian coaches’ decisions to acquire coaching certification. A mixed-methods convergent parallel design was employed to address the research question. The participants included 1,518 certified and noncertified coaches across Canada who completed an online questionnaire identifying the barriers and facilitators to pursuing coaching certification; of this sample, 38 coaches participated in a follow-up telephone interview. Using the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change, the findings suggest that most coaches reside in the precontemplation stage, in which they believe in and are thinking about certification, but have yet to engage in preparation. The barriers to pursuing certification included time, cost, tediousness of the process, and inaccessible evaluators, whereas the facilitators included enhanced knowledge and skills and improved coaching reputation. Future directions for increasing participation rates in the certification process include clearly identifying and broadly disseminating the benefits of acquiring certification, clarifying the criteria for evaluation, streamlining the certification process and incorporating online models, enhancing accessibility of evaluators, and incentivizing and rewarding certification.