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Nearly 8 million high school students participate in athletics in the United States (NFSHA, 2018), yet we know little about the management of this level of athletics. This level of athletics is seeing increased involvement from parents and other stakeholders who provide resources to supplement declining athletic department budgets. Critical resources could be volunteering time to take tickets and sell concessions, to managing fundraising efforts for large department purchases. Athletic directors are leftto make decisions to balance the needs of all the internal and external stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of the athletic director in how they manage athletic department stakeholders. Interviews were conducted using a stratified sampling technique with 30 high school athletic directors. Inductive and deductive coding revealed that when it came to making larger decisions about hiring, policy changes, and budgetary moves, a stakeholder engagement tactic was used to manage relationships with cooperation and transparency. Future research may look towards individual level or organizational level factors that lead an athletic director to use stakeholder engagement tactics.
In the United States, students' participation in high school sport totals nearly eight million, which is up approximately a half million participants since 2008 (NFSHA, 2018), making interscholastic sport the largest sports program in the United States (for comparison, there are only 491,930 student-athletes competing at the NCAA level, [Irick, 2017]). High school sport is supported for many reasons ranging from physical, social, affective, and cognitive benefits (Bailey, Armour, Kirk, Jess, Pickup, & Sanford, 2009; Emie, Young, Harvey, Charity, & Payne, 2013). Various changes have impacted the administration of high school sport, particularly the changes in the funding of sport from budgetary cuts of extra curriculars to the increase in participation fees, as well as the role that parents are playing in their student-athlete's experience. These changes have impacted various internal and external stakeholders to high school sport from superintendents, principals, teachers and coaches internally, to impacting parents, boosters, and in the communities the schools reside externally.
We know very little of the management of stakeholders at this level of athletics, as well as the benefits and their dynamic involvement. High school athletic directors engage stakeholders in various capacities to bridge and build relationships, and to increase access to...