Understanding the role of mentors in sporting organisations supporting young males in their transitions towards adulthood

In this thesis I investigate the complexities of an emerging group-mentoring and rites-of-passage initiative for adolescent males living in the Penrith region of Western Sydney called Building Young Men. The Building Young Men (BYM) project is supported and facilitated by Panthers on the Prowl, the community development arm of the Penrith Panthers Rugby League Club. The BYM project engages with an emerging mentoring model, which I’ve called Dynamic Group Mentoring, to assist adolescent boys to reflect on their understandings of masculinity and to build trusted and sustainable social networks that, it is hoped, will enable the mentees to access various forms of capital beyond their current social spheres as they transition towards adulthood. Utilising Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ of habitus, field, and capital, I discuss the BYM mentees’ understandings of masculinity, rites of passage, mentoring, adulthood, capital, and time, as well as explore the implications of this youth program being facilitated by a prominent corporate sporting and hospitality institution. Bourdieu’s terminology and his methodological approach to social research assisted me in structuring an exploration of the complex dynamics of the emerging mentoring model Dynamic Group Mentoring and of the BYM program. I employed a reflexive research approach that I believe this project required from me, being simultaneously primary researcher, BYM mentor, BYM group facilitator, BYM Project Development Team member, and social worker. Balancing the needs of these roles, as I wrote this thesis I discovered opportunities for reflexive writing that helped me identify power dynamics in these positions I held and performed. Set within a hypermasculine sporting organisation, I have worked to structure a field of practice in which participants can explore multiple versions of the masculine. Although further opportunity exists for significant development towards this goal of multiplicity, I believe that this project begins to develop of a site of resistance to the dominating versions of masculinity which emanate from hypermasculine sporting arenas and corporate entities involved in associated social initiatives