New RST faculty member brings a critical eye to sport policy

When Anna Posbergh studies sport, she isn’t focused on the final score.

She’s interested in something less visible but just as influential: the rules that determine who gets to play, how those rules are written and why decision-makers arrive at the conclusions they do.

This fall, Posbergh joins the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor, bringing an interdisciplinary approach to sport policy that blends public health, governance, media studies and critical sport scholarship. Her work examines how evidence is selected, interpreted and translated into policies that shape opportunities for women athletes and the broader sport landscape.

For Posbergh, arriving at Illinois represents more than a new faculty appointment. It’s a return to the kind of academic environment where she believes her work can have the greatest impact.

“I truly feel most at home in a university college that is health science-focused,” she said. During her academic career, she has worked across colleges of education, liberal arts, humanities and public health, experiences that reinforced her belief that understanding sport requires perspectives from multiple disciplines.

That interdisciplinary foundation began during her doctoral studies in kinesiology at the University of Maryland, where she found herself immersed in a public health environment. Rather than viewing sport strictly through competition or performance, she learned to connect it with broader questions about health, community well-being and social systems.

Those ideas continue to shape both her research and teaching.

Before coming to Illinois, Posbergh spent three years as a faculty member at Florida State University. Although she enjoyed her work there, Illinois offered something she found difficult to ignore: a culture known for collaboration.

She was drawn by the university’s research reputation and membership in the Association of American Universities, but she says it was the people who ultimately convinced her.

“The culture in Recreation, Sport and Tourism in particular has a reputation, even outside Illinois, for consisting of brilliant individuals who wholly care about making the world a better place, becoming the best intellectuals and scholars they can be, and building each other up,” she said.

One lesson from her own mentors has stayed with her throughout her career: choose collaboration over competition. She sees that philosophy reflected throughout the College of Applied Health Sciences, where faculty members value interdisciplinary partnerships and practical scholarship.

That emphasis on application also aligns closely with her own goals. Whether communicating with students, policymakers, journalists or sport organizations, Posbergh wants her research to extend beyond academic journals and become useful to the people making decisions that affect athletes and communities.

In broad terms, Posbergh describes her research as examining the governance and representation of women athletes.

More specifically, she studies policymaking in sport, especially policies regulating women’s competition and athlete eligibility, asking which evidence policymakers choose, how they interpret it and why they arrive at particular conclusions.

Those questions have become increasingly relevant as debates surrounding women’s sport, athlete eligibility and transgender participation have moved from academic conferences into legislatures, governing bodies and national headlines.

Although policy remains her primary focus, Posbergh increasingly studies media and public opinion as well.

That’s because policymaking, she argues, isn’t simply a top-down process.

Public narratives, media coverage and societal beliefs often influence how scientific evidence is understood long before a policy is formally adopted. Decision-makers bring their own assumptions and interpretations into the process, making governance as much about people as documents.

She summarizes her work with characteristic humor.

“I read a lot of bylaws, laws and bills,” she said, “especially relating to girls’ and women’s sport and female/transgender eligibility, and I question how and why they arrived at that outcome.”

Posbergh’s path into sport policy began long before graduate school.

As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, she interned with the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. The experience introduced her to research while exposing her to issues surrounding gender equity in athletics.

She describes that opportunity as career-changing. Her academic interests also reflected an unusual combination of disciplines. She studied English, mathematics and kinesiology, an academic mix that later proved invaluable when she encountered scholarship examining testosterone regulations in elite women’s sport.

The topic demanded quantitative reasoning, critical analysis and an understanding of sport, bringing together all three areas of her undergraduate education. She immersed herself in the literature, eventually building her dissertation around what she called “protective policies”—regulations designed to protect women’s sport through rules governing athlete eligibility, health and participation.

Posbergh argues that competing sport policies often claim to be guided by science while relying on different bodies of research or interpreting similar findings in dramatically different ways.

As public attention to these issues expanded dramatically over the following years, her research became increasingly timely.

One of Posbergh’s central research questions asks a deceptively simple question: What counts as evidence?

In her work examining transgender athlete policies, for example, she studies how policymakers select scientific literature to support predetermined policy approaches. Some policies emphasize research they interpret as demonstrating competitive advantages, while others prioritize public health evidence highlighting the benefits of sport participation and the harms associated with exclusion.

Her research has also compared how scientific studies are represented in policies and systematic reviews.

She says her findings raise broader questions about policymaking integrity, particularly when research is cited in ways that do not accurately reflect the original scientific conclusions. Although her work often centers on transgender athlete policies, she believes the implications extend much further.

For Posbergh, ensuring that policies accurately represent evidence matters not only for ethical governance but also for every athlete affected by those decisions.

Illinois offers opportunities to expand that work through collaboration. Given her focus on governance, Posbergh sees natural partnerships with scholars in law, political science and public policy, particularly around questions involving legal precedent, policymaking and regulation.

She also hopes to work closely with Illinois’ Division of Intercollegiate Athletics. Because athletic departments ultimately implement many of the policies she studies, collaborating directly with practitioners can help ensure research remains practical, relevant and accessible to those responsible for putting policy into action.

While her research tackles nationally debated issues, Posbergh says her goals in the classroom are straightforward. She doesn’t want students to memorize her conclusions.

Instead, she wants them to develop the habits of mind necessary to evaluate evidence, understand competing viewpoints and explain why they hold their own beliefs.

“I believe my responsibility is not to tell students what to think,” she said. “It’s my responsibility to help them understand why they believe what they believe.”

She hopes students leave her classes prepared to analyze complex issues thoughtfully, engage respectfully with differing perspectives and become ethical leaders within sport organizations and beyond.

As Posbergh begins her career at Illinois, she’ll continue asking difficult questions about some of sport’s most contested issues. But whether she’s studying policy, mentoring students or collaborating with colleagues across campus, her objective remains consistent: to better understand how evidence becomes action, and how thoughtful scholarship can help build stronger, more equitable systems for sport.

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