Basketball Discourse Community

The Team Can Be a Discourse Community Too: The game of basketball along with football and soccer is one of the most prominent sports in the United States and the World. It’s played at every level from 5 & under to the professional athletes in the NBA and overseas. Every team is made up of virtually the same elements; the guards, big men and coaches. Basketball is not a sport where you can focus solely on yourself, but the focus should be on the team. The sport is very public and easy to see, however there are many things that occur behind closed doors when no one is looking.

A basketball team is a great example of a discourse community. In a discourse community you have a few characteristics such as the goals, lexis and genre of the team. Goals are the team’s main focus/points that they want to achieve. Genre is basically how the members of the team stay connected and in contact with each other. Lexis can be described as the language and terminology used between the team members.

Goals

At every level in life people use goal setting to chase and achieve a desired solution. John Swales tells us that, “a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.” (220) Goals are a worldwide starting point for a lot of different things that does not exclude basketball. Personally

That phone call to your mom, and even that text you send your friends. We come across genre in basketball too. You have the scouting report, it shows the other team’s plays, their players and what they do. It keeps the coaches and players on the same page, it also helps the coach to know what to do in certain situations. Another form of genre in basketball is the playbook. The playbook consist of offensive plays and defensive plays that your team runs. It’s important because without the playbook it would take more time to learn the plays, players would be confused, and with the lack of time mistakes can be made that can cost the team the