Climate is the real game changer
Jessica Murfree ’15 studies how the climate crisis reshapes sports and how athletes, fans and institutions can respond.
Weather can make or break a game day, but the climate crisis poses far greater challenges. Extreme heat, rising seas and poor air quality threaten athletes, fans and support staff alike.
These topics concern sport ecologists like Jessica Murfree, associate professor in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ exercise and sport science department. Her research examines how the sports industry impacts the environment and how environmental change affects sports.
Researchers in this field study everything from biodiversity, waste and energy consumption to playing surfaces, fan behavior and athlete health — reflecting the many ways sports and the environment intersect.
“The environment touches everything and everyone in different ways,” Murfree says. “The same is true in how people connect with or experience sports.”
Nature meets sport
As a kid growing up in Atlanta in the 1990s, Murfree cycled through nearly every sport available: swimming, tennis, volleyball, horseback riding and ballet. But soccer was the one she returned to season after season and what drew her to UNC-Chapel Hill.
“I had Mia Hamm posters on my bedroom wall and ‘Space Jam’ bedsheets,” she says. “And I went to soccer camps throughout the Carolinas. But going to UNC felt like a pipe dream.”
But she got in and graduated in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in exercise and sport science. She went to the University of Alabama for a master’s degree in kinesiology and then to the University of Louisville for a doctorate in sport administration. But in 2024, she returned to UNC-Chapel Hill to teach and conduct research at the intersection of sports and the environment.
“It’s a relationship that’s both understudied and underappreciated,” she says. “I want to demonstrate the importance of protecting and preserving the natural environment so that we can continue to enjoy sports now and into the future.”
Reimagining the future of play
Murfree leads the Action on Climate Change, Environment and Sport Studies lab. Her research spans multiple sports, environments and levels of play.
Large sports organizations like the NFL or the MLB may be able to bear the cost for needed climate adaptations. But resources are not evenly distributed across all levels of play. When ponds and lakes don’t freeze, kids who once skated outdoors for free may have to pay for indoor rink time. In warmer regions, some teams can afford shade, water stations and medical staff to manage extreme heat. Others cannot, forcing families to choose between safety and the chance to play.
Murfree’s lab is surveying parents of youth soccer players to understand how they make decisions about their children’s involvement. In the U.S., roughly 9,000 high school athletes are treated for heat-related illness each year — a leading cause of death in young players.
“At what point does it become too hot, even in the state of North Carolina, for kids to continue playing soccer?” Murfree asks.
As access to recreation and opportunity narrows, Murfree imagines a future where sport is smaller.
“I would put the power back in the community — in parks, in public schools and in colleges,” she says. “We should put less pressure on making sport as big as it can be and try to make it as accessible as possible.”
Universities are part of this landscape. Positioned between professional leagues and local communities, campuses can serve as centers for innovation and a testing ground for ideas that make sports safer, more accessible and more sustainable.
“These organizations have the responsibility to deliver on what the people want, and what the people want is a long, healthy planetary life,” Murfree says.
