Forging Connections
Asynchronous Session
Transition to Retirement: Student-athlete Stories to New Beginnings through Gratitude and Prosociality
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tiara A. Cash
Each year, over 99% of collegiate athletes will end their sporting career within North America. This major life transition usually involves changes in identity, routine, and social support and athletes report struggling with feelings of loss, sadness, and anxiety during their transition to retirement (Cash et al., 2021). Given this, can the stories of retired athlete's help inform coaches, athletic departments and sport educators on how to best support the wellbeing of athletes who will be entering this transition? Through a multi-method design - obtaining converging evidence from recall surveys and qualitative methods - the author collected over 200+ retirement stories from retired collegiate athletes around North America spanning the 1970s - 2010s. This paper sheds light on the experiences recorded from these athletes through qualitative inquiry and present possible ways of support for current athletes – encouraging gratitude and prosocial behaviors. 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.
The Sociocultural Dynamics in the Making of Elite Iranian Wrestlers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Saeed Shamshirian
Sports performance is the collective product of place. Using Durkheim’s concept of social facts, we argue that individuals’ dispositions, attitudes, and thoughts on engaging in sports are marked by invisible social forces encompassing them at a given time and place. We further make use of Alexander’s notion that the power of a culture, its efficiency and continuity, manifests itself in being acted upon and performed. To make our argument empirically applicable, we conducted a case study of internationally successful Iranian men’s wrestlers. The study reveals how the success of Iranian wrestling is rooted in cultural foundations, social organizations, multiple cooperative networks, and a set of social relations that are collectively arranged and coordinated to create a strong sports tradition for delivering world-class wrestlers. It is within a given social, cultural, and organizational context that culture is performed through a series of collective performances and agency. Such successful cultural performances further reinforce the meaning of specific cultural practices, which link the past to the present and give rise to the cultural continuity of the given cultural practices for others to follow and sustain, resulting in a tradition of collective sport achievement.
Gaelic Goes Global: The Sociocultural and Geopolitical Implications of Ireland's National Sports Abroad
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bennett Burke
The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) was founded in 1884 as a bulwark of Irish physical culture against the growing Anglicization of Ireland. It has since become the largest amateur sporting association in the world and a crucial facet of Irish life. The two main sports governed by the GAA - Gaelic football and hurling - are the most popular in Ireland in terms of participation and attendance, and GAA clubhouses serve as vital hubs for communities across the island. However, in addition to its prolific institutional status in Ireland, there is a growing GAA scene abroad, with hundreds of teams in cities around the world. These teams are composed of varying proportions of Irish expats seeking community and a piece of home in a foreign country, and non-Irish locals who are fascinated by the electric gameplay of Gaelic football and hurling and want to try something new. As the internet reduces distances between cultures and facilitates the uptake of previously obscure sports, there exists a variety of opinions among native Irish people regarding the participation in Gaelic games of non-Irish people. Some regard any uptake of the games as a positive development, and many official outlets of the GAA actively promote its growth abroad. Others express reservations about globalization watering down the distinct significance of the games to Irish identity. As the GAA continues to grow beyond its birthplace, the phenomenon of its spread provides unique insights into the situation of traditional games in an increasingly interconnected world.
Net Ecological: Pickup Basketball as Ecological Practice of Improvisation and Interdependence
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jerald Lim
Pickup basketball is inherently ecotopian, a prefigurative enactment of more sensible ways of relating to each other. Pickup is a cultural practice of surrender into a larger interdependence, breaking from the capitalist status quo of ownership, alienation, and disenchantment. I present the ecological merit of pickup using methods drawn from history and anthropology, synthesizing the development of basketball and my own experiences with it into an assemblage of stories. Contrary to organized basketball, “in pickup ball there is no performance other than the daily practice. It is not preparation for a future high-stakes performance, it is the living game itself” (Mc Laughlin 3). It sets aside the illusion of scarcity that capitalism insists is the natural state of things by supplying simplicity, satisfying “our longing for immediacy of experience, in which we use all that we have and see how it works” (Cooper 62). Gay characterizes the accessibility of pickup as an “elsewhere [...] whose logics [...] refuse ownership and the owners, refuse settling and the settler" (160). At the same time, pickup also reveals our critical interdependence. “Basketball players need each other to have fun”, and self constitute norms around queuing for games accordingly; “ultimately the desired good is not [...] the moves of the game, but the interplay between people that makes the game fun” (Jimmerson 370). Perhaps it is in prefigurative experiences like pickup where we, sharing space with those beyond the environmentalist choir, might pick up our shattered ecology and make it whole once more.
