Examining the grassroots participant legacy of major sporting "supplemental" events

For a considerable time, major sporting events have been investigated to explore their "participation" legacy impact (effect on participation in sports at the grassroots level), often with mixed results. In this article, the authors propose an approach to examine not major events themselves, but adjacent, supplemental events, and whether such events can contribute to a participation legacy. The authors do this by developing a "grassroots participation ladder," built on the transtheoretical model, which has been amended to examine the stages of behavior between no involvement in a sport and ongoing sports participation. An initial test of the ladder is conducted via a case study of supplemental events conducted in conjunction with the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup and involving interviews with event participants to demonstrate how the ladder might be utilized. Results suggest that previous measurement methods have typically neglected a key constituent, which offers a new recognition of potential participation legacy benefits, and feeds back into suggested methods of planning more effective participation legacy activities in the future.