Empowering youth athletes against the odds : Successful talent-development environments in underserved communities

• The research on the career pathways of professional athletes is well established in sport psychology, yet this field is lacking insight into the lives of athletes whose formative years were spent primarily in an American underserved community (Stambulova & Wyllemann, 2014). Using the Holistic Ecological Approach as a framework, this PhD project’s aim is to begin to understand how professional athletes were able to circumvent the environmental hardships and still reach the professional level of their chosen sport (Henriksen, 2010; Henriksen & Stambulova, 2017). This study involved in-depth, biographical interviews with N = 10 professional athletes who overcame significant adversity. Through the analysis of the data, many commonalities emerged. Key transitional and existential relationships, an understanding that sport was a way out of hardship and an ability to shift and persist through adversity, were key themes identified in the data. However, considering multi- and equifinality, no two lives are exactly the same and life stories can converge and diverge at many different junctions. Thus, this presentation will contain a brief summary of two athletes who overcame many of the same obstacles, reached a similar level in their sport, yet it is clear that their environment shaped them in drastically different ways.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Psykologi -- Tillämpad psykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Psychology -- Applied Psychology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

career pathways

low socio-economic status

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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