Huizinga (1950) argued for a conceptual overlap between sport, games, and play. Others, like McIntyre (1981), contended that sport was a socially established cooperative activity. Still others maintained that the definitiveness of sport lies in the exemplification of specific criteria, such as competitiveness (Krein, 2014; 2015). No one has asked non-specialists about their views despite that they may have strong, considered views. In this paper, we report results of an experiment we conducted where we asked 879 participants to rate 36 activities on a sport-likeness scale. We hypothesised that participants would rate activities governed by constitutive rules (overcoming unnecessary obstacles to achieve a goal (Suits 1978), e.g., golf’s aim is to get the ball in the hole) more highly sport-like than those activities that are governed by facilitative rules (rules that facilitate an activity, e.g., the goal of sprinting is to run a short distance as fast as possible). We also hypothesised that activities with predominantly gross motor demands, such as rugby or American football, would be rated more highly sport-like than those activities that relied primarily on fine motor skill, like snooker or archery. While some results were surprising, our hypotheses were borne out by the data we collected.
