Abstract
Taking crisis to mean a time of testing, a crisis has revelatory potential. Housed within the medical tradition, a crisis is that point where the change in the disease moves one either toward death or toward recovery. A crisis is inherently a turning-point. Lessons for how to make the turning be toward something more positive, more constructive, and more cohesive can be learned through sport participation, specifically through team-based participation. Teams are a complicated “live” dynamic mixing small group and organizational interaction. They are also a playful undertaking, taking play as work that invokes creative agency. When crisis is encountered, what had been working, no longer will. What was predictable, no longer is. For anyone who has participated on teams, crises and their aftermath from the minute to the significant, are experiences that stick in one’s mind. Through an analysis incorporating reflection on the author’s own lived experience as a competitive as well as recreational coach and athlete, moments of crisis are explored where engaging in creative agency results in individuals, teams, and communities performing with intecontextual consistency, resiliency, and sustainably. Through analysis incorporating, a communication variant of self-other psychology, when teams and communities are not bounded by the limitations and/or overreaching of individuals, performance becomes not primarily about goal attainment but rather about communication-centric enactment of co-constructed possibility. Extending these lessons beyond sports, the idea of a team-based life emerges. In this life approach, what crises reveals is a continually responsive living dynamic, turning toward recovery, toward positivity.
Presenters
Heidi MullerProfessor, Communication and Journalism, University of Northern Colorado, Colorado, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
2021 Special Focus—Sport and Society in Crisis
KEYWORDS
Resiliency, Turning Point, Team-Based Life, Creative Agency, Communication, Positivity
