Week 10: Papers and Presentations

Hello, and welcome back to the blog! This week was all about wrapping up the project, finishing the paper, and creating my presentation for Saturday’s symposium. I’ll keep this pretty short and just give you the highlights of what is shaping up to be a really successful experiment.

The paper ended going in the order of the following:

1. A historical contextualization, which explained the discrimination of minority golfers from the inception of the sport in Scotland in 1754 to the racist caddie system of the 20th century, to the fact that only 8% of golfers were minorities in 1990.
2. The preconceived notions about the Tiger effect and the pandemic effects that I’ve thoroughly explained throughout this blog.
3. The unsung effect of youth development groups, which starts to build the premise of my research question. I explained how this third effect has an effect that may explain the boom even past the pandemic jump.
4. The research question: What are the reasons behind the prolonged resurgence of Latino participation in post-pandemic golf, and what role do youth development groups play in attracting these communities to the sport?
5. The methodology for the literary review on leading questions and comfort, as well as who I asked for interviews and what each brought to the insights.
6. The four findings: the gateway to professionalism, First Tee as a community gathering space, the overall meaning of community as it applies to golf, and the lowering of barriers post-pandemic.
7. A word on the demographic data, which saw an increase even past the pandemic years and is showing minimal signs of letting up.
8. Conclusion and optimization, including what my recommendations to the program would be, especially around labeling their program as a professional development program on top of the golf that they provide.

The presentation was more of the same content packed into a lecture format, and I decided to heavily lean into jokes and analogies to make the audience understand what I’m talking about on a general level. Excited and a little nervous for Saturday, but I think I’ve done good work on making the project as sound as possible! Thank you so much for reading, and I’ll be back for a final reflection!