42 MY JOURNEY IN SPORT TOURISM – Contributions by Heather Gibson
42 MY JOURNEY IN SPORT TOURISM – Contributions by Heather Gibson
Getting Started
I never intended to teach and research in tourism; I was destined for sport sociology. However, in arriving at the University of Connecticut in 1986 to work with Andrew Yiannakis on my master’s degree, I found a mentor who was starting some exploratory work in tourism, notably extending Cohen’s (1972) and Pearce’s (1985) ideas on tourist roles. One of these tourist roles, the Sportlover role resonated with me as I had always been active and studying in New England (USA) I could finally go skiing more regularly as the mountains were only two hours away! So, the idea that people would travel to take part in sport was a behavior I recognized. But in the mid to late 1980s few people were combining sport and tourism and in fact, when I did my MS thesis examining tourist role preference across the life course, for some reason the sportlover role had been dropped from that version of our questionnaire (Gibson, 1989; Yiannakis & Gibson, 1992). However, extending this work for my doctoral dissertation, not only did we add more roles, but revived the sportlover (Gibson, 1994). My dissertation work also set the scene for several consistent characteristics that are still in my work today: 1. A focus on tourist behavior from the perspective that tourism is a special form of leisure; 2. A focus on gender, notably women’s behavior; and 3. A focus on different stages of the life course, as well as using a life span perspective. It was a combination of these three characteristics along with the sportlover role that culminated in a conference paper at the 1994 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport conference where I met a few scholars who were also starting to connect sport and tourism, one being Paul DeKnop who with Joy Standeven (she was one of my undergraduate lecturers) wrote the first comprehensive book on sport tourism (Standeven & DeKnop, 1999) and Laurence Chalip who has not only been a great mentor to me, but provided me with many opportunities that raised my profile as a scholar specializing in sport tourism. In fact, it was Laurence who invited me to write my 1998 paper reviewing the literature (as it existed then) on sport tourism for the inaugural issue of Sport Management Review (Gibson, 1998).
In my 1998 Sport Management Review paper, I joined the pervasive discussions on defining sport tourism that were occurring as both scholars and the industry started to take more notice of the sport and tourism connection. I proposed three forms of sport tourism: 1. Active Sport Tourism which has its origins in the Sportlover role; 2. Event Sport Tourism, which at this point was confined to spectators travelling to watch sport; and 3. Counter to many others who were writing at the time, I followed the lead of Redmond (1991) in proposing Nostalgia Sport Tourism which I saw as encompassing behaviors such as stadium tours, sports museums and the many sports themed attracti