Emerging Scholars in Sport
Aarhus University
Featured Athletic Transitions: Does Prosociality Support Student-Athlete Wellbeing during Transition to Retirement? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tiara A. Cash, Angie Fan
Collegiate athlete retirement is a major life transition that involves changes in identity, routine, and social support. Approximately 99% of the nearly half a million current NCAA athletes will retire after their collegiate career and many of these athletes struggle with feelings of loss, sadness, and anxiety during their transition to retirement. Given this, what can universities, athletic departments, and sport educators do to support the wellbeing of these athletes throughout this transition? One overlooked strategy that shows promise is prosociality, defined as kind or generous behavior (Jensen, 2016). Through a multi-method approach - obtaining converging evidence from recall surveys, weekly diaries, and experimental design - we conduct two studies to answer three research questions: RQ1: To what extent do retiring collegiate athletes engage in prosocial behavior during the time of their transition out of sport (i.e. the first year of retirement)?; RQ2: Do retired athletes who engage in more prosocial behavior during this transition cope better and experience greater psychological well-being?; RQ3: If prosociality does indeed support well-being during this transition, do social connection and/or sense of meaning provide potential mechanistic pathways? Results from these studies are presented. This research has the potential to assist the lives of many collegiate athletes who transition to retirement and inform institutional programming while supporting those communities through prosocial behaviors.
Featured Creating a Caring and Winning Culture in the New Zealand Netball Team
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lana McCarthy, Dennis Slade, Geoffrey Watson, Andrew John Martin
This paper reflects on the ways in which women leaders of the New Zealand national netball team, the Silver Ferns, have created their team culture. There is a paucity of research on leadership in high performance female sport, particularly from coaches and captains. The objective of this research is to examine aspects of culture and leadership through insights of the team leaders. These insights are developed through application of Schein’s (2010) three level theoretical model of organizational culture integrating artefacts (rites & rituals, symbols and stories), values and beliefs, and core assumptions. The findings provide practical implications for coaches and managers in developing sporting cultures and team identities. Analysis of semi-structured interviews with ten former captains and coaches of the New Zealand Silver Ferns national netball team, charts the development of the evolving nature of this culture over three distinct eras of the game. This study highlights the transition of a culture from generally autocratic in the amateur period to a more empowering context in the professional era. It concludes that ultimately the culture is proving to be successful on court without sacrificing values of care and respect for all team members on and off the court. The team culture has similarities with other elite sport teams, for example focusing on winning, but perhaps a point of difference is the prominence given to a caring culture. The implications are for developing teams of women, led by women, and for women’s sport culture.
Featured Challenges of Being a Young Female Thrower in Portugal: An Analysis of Gender, Sport, and Portuguese Society View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rita Pires
The key purpose of this study is to explore female athletes' perceptions of gender, sports, and Portuguese society. The study involves three female athletes who had long careers in Track and Field Throwing and have a middle-class background. By using unstructured interviews that lasted at least one hour and a half per athlete, different life perspectives were obtained to be analysed in the study. Categories were created to develop direct connections between the various transformations that occur during young female athletes' development. Even though athletes' stories differ from those who the male or female “judges”, there is still a general sense that the athletes are suffering and being judged by patriarchal society. As a consequence, increasing research in this field is critical for the elimination of sexualization-related repercussions, such as sexual harassment and abuse in sports.
