Sports Law Professor Jeffrey Levine Receives Awards from Sports and Recreation Law Association
Drexel University Assistant Clinical Professor of Sport Management Jeffrey Levine received multiple awards in recognition of his leadership, service and commitment to research at the Sports and Recreation Law Association annual conference, held March 4-7 in Louisville, Kentucky.
Jeffrey Levine and John J. Miller
Levine has been a member of SRLA since 2014 and has regularly presented collaborative research with other SRLA members over the past six years. According to SRLA, receiving the the 2020 Lori K. Miller Young Professional Award reflects Levine’s status as “an individual who demonstrates commitment to the study and instruction of the legal aspects of sport and recreation; service to the field and SRLA; and potential for future growth and excellence in those same areas.”
“This is an association full of colleagues that I greatly respect. Knowing who’s received this award previously, it was quite an honor just to be considered, and it’s incredible to have won,” Levine says.
Levine received two additional honors at the conference: he was designated as a SRLA Research Fellow, which “recognizes scholars by honoring their achievement in legal aspects of sport and recreation-related scholarship,” and he was also elected to SRLA’s Executive Board as the Honors and Award Committee Chair.
“I am excited to help to chart the course for this organization through my position on the executive board,” he says.
Levine’s research agenda focuses on governance and policy issues in sport. Furthering this research agenda, and demonstrating his commitment to scholarly research in sports and recreation law, Levine presented findings from three recent collaborations, including two centered on college athletics: an exploratory study examining university athletic departments’ policies covering use of student-athlete biometric data, and another analyzing athletic department strategies and procedures on combatting playing field incursions.
He also presented an asset utilization exploratory study of public recreation resources in Philadelphia, undertaken with Gareth J. Jones, assistant professor of sport and recreation management in Temple University’s School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management, and Andy Viren, performance manager for Philadelphia Parks & Recreation.
Levine and his collaborators examined the permitting requests for private events held at Parks & Recreation (PPR) sites, along with statistics on programming available at various PPR sites throughout the city, then layered over their map the demographic data surrounding those sites.
“Having performed this study, the goal is now to develop policies that maximize the resource that PPR is offering while maintaining equitable use, which is the mandate for PPR,” Levine says.
Levine was a doctoral student at the University of Louisville from 2014 to 2016, and the SRLA conference marked his first visit to Louisville since defending his dissertation in 2018.
“It was great to come back and rekindle these relationships.” he said, noting that both of his dissertation advisors attended the ceremony where he received the Young Professionals Award