Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

“I can’t do it all,” captures the essence of the approach to team and community building presented herein. While athletes want to and should develop the full range of their skills and capacities, continually building on what they are able to do, realizing that they are a particular embodied athlete is key not only in developing their skill set but also in building the sport teams and communities with which they are affiliated. Through a PERPLE analysis incorporating reflection on the author’s own lived experience as a competitive as well as recreational coach and athlete and engaging with ideas of creative agency in sport, the me-in-team that is the complicated interplay of formal and informal roles dynamics in team participation, the approach to sport as strategic art, a communication variant of self-other psychology, and limitness which is a conceptualization of embodiment arising out of disability studies, the approach to team and community building as a process of creatively engaging the limits of one’s embodied particularity emerges. When undertaking this approach, individuals, teams, and communities become able to perform with intecontextual consistency, resiliency, and sustainably. When teams and communities are not bounded by the limitations and/or overreaching of individuals but rather are built creatively through individuals embracing their particular limits, performance becomes not primarily about goal attainment but rather about communication-centric enactment of co-constructed possibility. This approach is accessible to all individuals regardless of physical skill and therefore can be implemented at all levels of sporting competition and participation.