ABSTRACT
As this Handbook attests, the recent emergence of scholarship seeking to understand cross-national differences in sports development systems has generated more thorough efforts to characterize the ontological and ideological distinctions between the policies and programmes designed to cultivate elite athletes and encourage mass participation (cf. Chalip et al 1996; Green and Oakley 2001). Scholars and practitioners interested in understanding sport in the United States may be surprised to learn that the systems undergirding youth sport development are remarkable as much for their lack of interconnectedness as for their production of successful elite athletes on the international stage (B. Green 2005). Despite the high-profile nature of the latter systemic output, it is the facade of coordination at the input stage that serves as the primary focus of this chapter.
