Within the context of elite sport exists an ever increasing population of transnationally mobile athletes. For these migrants it is imperative that performance is sustained as they adjust to a new team environment. However, the transitional experience of joining a new club in a different country can be extremely challenging and failure to adjust can negatively impact an athlete’s well-being and their sporting performance (Schinke & McGannon, 2014). Despite the potentially severe implications of maladjustment, the acculturative experiences of migrating athletes has seen limited focus.
This presentation will introduce research that seeks to investigate transnational adjustment in elite sport from a uniquely multi-disciplinary standpoint. Situated at the intersection of Cultural Sports Psychology, Critical Acculturation and Sociolinguistics, a primary aim of the project is to understand transition from a narrative perspective. Here the conceptualisation of narrative is multi-faceted; first, it refers to how participants construct their acculturative experiences through positioning within stories and second, emphasis is placed on the shared narratives of players, e.g. what team discourses do incoming players draw on in order to make sense of their adjustment experiences.
My preliminary findings show that narratives form part of the new player’s socialisation into the team and are associated with the positions taken by senior players, e.g. commitment to the club facilitates personal transition. Moreover, the data suggests that these positions had been adopted by the senior players themselves when they were new members. This points to the manifestation of a perpetuating team discourse passed from team to team.
With this talk I will outline the current state of the project before revealing samples of fieldwork data collected through semi-structured interviews and observations in order to illustrate key findings of the research. I will conclude the presentation by advancing the narrative approach as an effective tool in understanding the challenges faced by migrating athletes.
References
Schinke, R. J., & McGannon, K. R. (2014). The acculturation experiences of (and with) immigrant athletes. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 12(1), 64-75.
