College students are well known as passionate activists on issues ranging from environmentalism and free speech to politics and healthcare. Few campaigns, though, involve sport and social change.

With that in mind, Northeastern University’s Sport in Society – an organization that uses sport to create social change through research, education and advocacy – is initiating a unique program to create student groups at universities and high schools across the country that will explore using sport as a vehicle for human-rights advocacy, for promoting social justice within sport itself and for studying intersecting issues in sport and society.

The conversation we are encouraging should not address scores, trades, championships or drafts. Rather, we are driving at how the passion for sport in this country can be used to improve people’s lives. 

These groups will focus on five areas:

Community service. Individual clubs will identify and organize local community-outreach opportunities for members. In this way, each branch engage with its community and enhance service-learning opportunities.

Innovation and action. The clubs will provide a space in which members can identify and act on their own interests at the sport-society intersection. This will allow groups to grow organically and move in directions that best fit their members and communities. This flexibility will also allow the groups to mobilize on issues and topics as they arise.

Collaboration. Structures at both the state and national levels will facilitate collaboration among groups from different institutions as well as among groups within institutions. These structures will include conferences, Web-based communication and other means. Sport in Society will function as a connector and overseer for these collaborative initiatives.

Career development. By holding seminars with industry practitioners and visiting organizations involved in sport and society, students will have opportunities to learn about different careers and secure internships or jobs in the field of sport. This is critical for helping students to navigate what can otherwise be an unknown or nebulous field. In addition, it will provide employers an opportunity to secure the services of talented individuals.

Research. With the support of university faculty, the clubs will have research components in which students study various issues at the sport-society intersection. This will lead to more theses about sport and society, a student journal about sport and society, and more research assistants for academics who are already studying this intersection. Such emphasis will support the notion that athletics is a subject worthy of scholarly research, as recently advocated by the NCAA’s Scholarly Colloquium on Intercollegiate Athletics.

For this endeavor, it is imperative to recruit from the student-athlete and non-student-athlete communities. As former student-athletes and non-student-athletes ourselves, we have seen just how much a group like this is needed. Student-athletes can be consumed by their teams and, as a result, sometimes feel alienated from other opportunities their institutions offer.

At the same time, students who have played sports in high school but did not or could not continue on in college often miss the influence of sport in their lives. Further, these groups will provide non-athletes who are passionate about social justice a new opportunity to explore their interests.

Our group will allow all of these students to invest themselves in a common goal: using sport to change the lives of people locally and globally. This will complement Sport in Society’s already successful Athletes in Service initiative as well as the NCAA’s efforts to encourage athletes to give back to their communities.

Sport in Society is working with universities in Boston and other interested campuses around the country to establish and develop the student clubs. These universities will be able to draw on Sport in Society’s resources – namely its research fellows, community partners and staff. This initial network and framework will provide a springboard for our effort to make sport in society student groups commonplace at universities and highs schools.

Let’s face it, as athletes, none of us has ever been very good at sitting and watching from the sidelines. Are you ready to get in the game?

Alison Mehlsak, a political science major and former soccer student-athlete at Tufts from 2005-07, can be reached at alison.mehlsak@tufts.edu. David Tannenwald, a government major at Harvard, can be reached at david.tannenwald@gmail.com. Brad Guillory, a psychology major at Northeastern, can be reached at guillory.b@neu.edu. For more information about Sport in Society, see www.sportinsociety.org.