Community sports clubs can provide children with opportunities for valuable physical exercise. However, researchers have identified specific problems these clubs face as volunteer associations. One of the issues often raised by parents is the way coaches select players to participate in matches. This is the focus of the present study. An online survey was conducted among coaches who had experience in coaching team sports in community-based junior sport clubs in Japan (N = 456). Results indicated that competitiveness and attendance were important criteria for player selection, which implies that coaches place the emphasis on winning as well as on enjoyment. However, a lower premium was placed on winning when we asked coaches directly about their values. One possible explanation for this discrepancy may be a desire to appear socially “correct.” Winning has traditionally been valued in community sports clubs, which originally started as instruments of health maintenance and enjoyment.

　Community sports groups, organizations in which parents are strongly involved, have various hidden problems, including inappropriate parental interaction, corporal punishment inflicted by coaches, and peer bullying. There is an urgent need to develop a sport parenting scale and harassment in sport scale in order to identify ways of improving parent-child and coach-child interaction. This study presents an attempt to construct a prototype of these scales. We conducted a questionnaire survey on sport- parenting and harassment in sports among 600 mothers and 300 fathers of elementary school children who participate or have participated in community sporting activists. The survey yielded a three-factor structure for the sport-parenting scale: “controlling interactional style,” “teamfocused interactional style,” and “empathetic interactional style,” and a three-factor structure for the harassment in sport scale: “Harassment from bench people,” “harassment from peers,” and “harassment from coach.” Both scales had strong reliability. We confirmed the scalesʼ goodness-of-fit by conducting a confirmatory factor analysis, and then confirmed their stability by conducting separate factor analyses for each gender of the parents and each gender of the children..

　We investigated the problems faced by community-based junior sports clubs in Japan from the perspective of club membersʼ parents. Using an online survey, we targeted 300 fathers and 600 mothers of children who participate or used to participate in team sports. We coded the descriptive data, and extracted four major categories (“coach” “team policy,” “parental involvement” and “environmental factors”). We then formulated sub-categories for each of these major categories, and extracted a total of 23 sub-categories, including “no / donʼt know” and “other.” The major category containing the largest number of codes was “parental involvement,” which accounted for 26.0% of all codes. We conducted a chi-square test on sport type by gender of parents. The test indicated that many of the mothersʼstatements pertained to issues like “the burden of parental duty” and “relationships among parents.”Fathers, on the other hand, were significantly more likely to mention factors like “coach” and “weak team.” Regarding types of sports, statements pertaining to “the burden of parental duty” were more frequent regarding baseball.