White students are “overrepresented” on Canadian university sport teams, says a groundbreaking study that examined race at the varsity level.

While white students made up 52 per cent of the total student body at the nine universities included in the study, they accounted for 81 per cent of the athletes on the surveyed teams, according to the report by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Sport Policy Studies.

“We had heard anecdotally from athletes and coaches that their sports teams were very white, and we wanted to take a snapshot and see how white they really were,” said Professor Peter Donnelly, the centre’s director, who co-authored the study with student Madison Danford.

“We were surprised by our findings. We thought basketball might be different [in line with the diversity reflected in the National Basketball Association]. Still, the university basketball teams were whiter than their student populations.”

Data was collected on nine universities — Toronto, York, Ryerson, McMaster, Queen’s, Western, University of Alberta, University of British Columbia and McGill — and five sports.

The study, which looked at both male and female teams in 2017, found that white student athletes accounted for more than 90 per cent of players on ice hockey and volleyball teams; approximately 80 per cent of the players on field hockey teams; 70 per cent of football players and almost 66 per cent of basketball players.

“I’m not surprised by these findings. They confirm my observations,” said University of Toronto basketball player Daniel Johansson, who is of mixed Swedish and Zambian heritage.

“I think some minority students are unable to play sports due to financial barriers. There is also a cultural aspect to it. The sports they play may not be common in universities here.”

For the most part, Canadian universities do not collect racial information on their students, and neither do their sports teams. The study had to rely on self-reported racial demographics from the National Survey of Student Engagement — an annual survey of undergrad students at 1,300 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada — for the analysis.

Without having specific racial information on athletes, researchers examined individual photos on university athletic department websites and categorized team athletes as “white” and “other than white.”

With this less-than-perfect methodology, Donnelly acknowledged the findings should not be seen as comprehensive or authoritative but are instructive in terms of the condition of student representation in interuniversity sport.

“We have no reason to believe that as universities begin to collect more specific racial data, the results will be markedly different than those presented here,” he noted.

In total, 52.75 per cent of the students at the universities were identified as white and 47.25 per cent were visible minorities. Of the 1,639 athletes included in the study, 81.5 per cent or 1,336 were identified as white; 12.6 per cent (207) as Black; 2.1 per cent (34) as East Asian; 2.2 per cent (36) as South Asian; and 1.6 per cent (26) as others.

“In every sport and team in this pilot study, white student athletes are overrepresented in comparison to their proportion in the student population at their university, in some cases almost twice their proportion in the student population,” concluded the study, the first of its kind to look at race on Canadian university sports teams.

The universities with a more diverse student population generally had sports teams with a higher number of visible minority athletes. At Toronto, York and Ryerson — with visible minority enrolments between 55 and 65 per cent — at least 22 per cent of sports team members were minorities.

At Queen’s, where 23 per cent of students are visible minorities, athletes of colour accounted for less than 10 per cent of sports teams. And at University of British Columbia, minorities made up 56 per cent of the student population but only 17.5 per cent of its sports teams.

Donnelly suggested a mix of factors could explain the discrepancies.

“There can be a lack of opportunity to play and develop skills before university, in school or community sport, which involves both the availability of the sport and the means to participate,” he said. “There may be no role models in the sport and the community, and sometimes there are stereotypical expectations. For example, because mostly white players have played hockey, volleyball or field hockey, minority students can see these sports as less relevant or welcoming to them.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Access to higher education and sports has been an issue for racialized students, said York University Professor Enakshi Dua, adding that government data shows minority and immigrant groups are more likely to be underemployed and of low income than their white counterparts.

“One of the issues is how sport is organized prior to university. Income creates access,” said Dua, who specializes in feminist, anti-racist and equity issues. “Some parents put their kids into special training programs as early as 6. You may be good enough to get on a team but if you don’t have the additional training, you are not going to be competitive.”

University administrations must start compiling race-based data to better understand the extent of the inequity and develop policies to address the minority gaps in their enrolment and sport teams, Dua added.

U of T’s Johansson, born and raised in a “non-white” area in Stockholm, has played forward for the Varsity Blues for three years. He said his high school and recreational teams in Sweden were way more diverse than Canadian university teams. That said, he feels his racial background is not an issue when it comes to his sport.

“Everybody sees colour,” said Johansson, who self-identifies as Black and is a fourth-year political science major, “but it doesn’t matter when it comes to basketball. What matters is your character and skill.”

Johansson’s coach, John Campbell, said he was both surprised and disappointed with the report findings, though he has seen improvements in the diversity of teams over his 24-year coaching career.

“This brings up a lot of questions for us to address,” said Campbell, head coach of the U of T men’s basketball team for the fifth season.

Unlike American universities, Canadian universities generally offer only modest athletic scholarships, noted Campbell, and hundreds of Canadian high school athletes, many of them of minority backgrounds, are lured to play in the U.S. as a result of the financial support.

“Our values are different in Canada,” he said. “Our student athletes here are students first. There’s no question about it.”

U of T has made an effort to reach out to basketball players of diverse backgrounds through a partnership with Toronto Community Housing that buses in teams weekly from Jane and Finch, the East Mall, Sparroways and Albion to U of T’s Goldring Centre for basketball drills and competition under the guidance of mentors, Campbell said.

“This study is very important with respect to our sport teams and with respect to our university overall,” said Campbell. “We need to know the numbers of representation, what the barriers and biases are and why someone chooses to participate somewhere else as a student athlete.”