What Precedes Selection? Access and Advocacy in Athlete Pathways to Post-Secondary Sport

Before an athlete can be selected to compete in post-secondary sport, they first have to become visible to the people doing the selecting.

But what precedes visibility?

Competitive sport pathways are full of checkpoints and gatekeepers, and not all athletes encounter the same ones or experience them in the same way. A university coach may ultimately decide who is recruited, evaluated, or selected. Long before that decision, however, other people and environments may shape whether an athlete ever reaches the people making that decision.

Which club can an athlete access? Which competitions? Which club coach? Who does that coach know? Who gets recommended, introduced, or put on the field when university coaches are watching?

A club coach cannot decide whether an athlete makes a university team. But they may be the one with access to the key decision-maker.

Research on pathways into American college sport suggests that this access is not distributed evenly. McGovern (2018), for example, found that economic, social, and cultural capital shaped Latina athletes’ sport opportunities and navigation of college recruitment. Sethi and colleagues (2026) similarly examine how athletes’ ability to navigate gatekeepers in Division I recruitment varies alongside access to economic, social, and cultural capital.

It makes me wonder how much of what eventually looks like selection was shaped before selection ever began.

At 17, my only real athletic goal was to play university soccer.

Near the end of my final club season, my club coach did not play me at a showcase tournament where university coaches were watching. Later, that same coach spoke with a university coach about me and characterized my fitness negatively. I would not learn about that conversation until later.

My club coach could not decide whether I made the university team. The university coach could. But my club coach was the person with access to the next level.

When an opportunity did not appear to be coming my way, I chased the university coach down the hallway after a practice and asked for one myself.

I was not asking to bypass evaluation. I was advocating for access to it.

Eventually, I was evaluated and made the varsity team.

What let me chase that coach down the hallway was its own kind of capital—the audacity to treat speaking up as a live option, not a risk. Not every athlete has that audacity available to them. And that is the point: what can look like an individual decision to advocate may itself be shaped by unequal access to knowledge, confidence, relationships, and power.

What interests me now is how close I may have come to never reaching the person who was actually in a position to evaluate me.

What happens to the athlete who does not chase down the university coach?

What if they do not know they can?

More importantly, what if they do not know they need to?

And when athletes have to advocate their way through a gate, what do they carry with them once they are on the other side?

Perhaps a heightened sense that access is conditional. A need to keep proving they belong. A sharper awareness that opportunity can be given, withheld, or taken away by people with more power in the system.

Perhaps even a question about whether care, credibility, or support will remain available when their perceived value to the team changes.

That matters because advocacy is often framed as though the important outcome is simply whether the athlete spoke up and whether something happened afterward. But even successful advocacy can leave information behind: who believed them, who resisted, what argument finally worked, how much they had to prove, and whether their status appeared to shape the response.

What athletes carry forward is not necessarily damage.

Sometimes, it is knowledge.

Knowledge about who has power. Knowledge about what support is conditional. Knowledge about whether being a “valuable” athlete changes how quickly someone is believed, protected, accommodated, or taken seriously.

The gate does not disappear once an athlete makes the team—the conditionality just changes its terms. Where the currency was once access to selection, it may become playing time, support, credibility, or care. Speaking up carries a different question: what might it cost me now?

Anton-Lotruglio and McManama O’Brien’s (2025) systematic review identified several environmental and individual suicide risk factors within U.S. intercollegiate sport, including athletic pressure, toxic team culture, barriers to mental-health services, athlete identity, and injury. Their review also discusses how performance and playing time are closely connected, and how some athletes may avoid seeking mental-health support because they fear coaches could lose confidence in them or reduce their playing time.

In other words, getting through one gate may simply place the athlete in front of another.

The gatekeeper changes. So does the gate.

This research is American, and that distinction matters. Anton-Lotruglio and McManama O’Brien intentionally excluded non-U.S. sport settings because they viewed the American intercollegiate context as sufficiently distinct to limit direct comparison. They also acknowledge that the extent to which their findings generalize beyond U.S. college athletes is unknown.

Canadian post-secondary sport should not be understood simply through an American template. But different systems can still illuminate shared questions about access, belonging, identity, power, care, and opportunity.

Collaboration does not require imitation.

Selection is part of competitive sport. Ability matters.

But access to having that ability seen and evaluated is something different.

And once athletes make it through, another question remains:

What did they have to learn about the system in order to get there?

Sources, in order of appearance:

McGovern, J. (2018). “You Have to Have Money to Be Good”: How Capital Accumulation Shapes Latinas’ Pathways to College Sports.

Sethi, S. K., Hextrum, K., & Pericak, K. (2026). Global recruitment fields: International college athletes, regulatory bodies, and opportunities to play Division I intercollegiate athletics in the U.S.

Anton-Lotruglio, E. M., & McManama O’Brien, K. H. (2026). College Student-Athlete Suicide: A Systematic Review.