ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role sports play as a mediating factor for school experience, school attachment, and academic achievement. African American athletes at Parlington High displayed many of the attitudes and behaviors that can be considered to be part of an oppositional identity; they sold drugs, skipped classes, defied teachers, and even yelled at coaches. The chapter suggests that coaches can make a major difference in the lives of young black athletes, not simply through such traditional cultural cliches as instilling discipline and perseverance, but through moral and material support outside the sports setting that is well beyond what is formally expected of coaches. Family ties, friendship ties, and in the case of the athletes at Parlington High, sports ties, can provide resources such as the inside track to jobs, or even knowledge about educational programs that eventually can improve one’s standing.
