This article breaks new ground in the sociology of sports work through its novel exploration of unchallenged deception in performance sports coaching contexts. Qualitative Jisc online survey data from 29 sports workers (coaches, performance analysts, sports scientists, doctors, a sport psychologist, physiotherapist, and scout) was subject to iterative analysis. Findings address how participants detected diverse deception attempts by co-workers and why they concealed and did not challenge the lies that they heard. Our theoretical interpretation of these findings builds on Goffman and Hochschild to advance Shulman's theorisation of unchallenged deception. We offer, through iterative analysis of participant accounts, the concept of strategic gullibility as a new heuristic for understanding how workers manage the implications of others' lies while concealing having detected them. In doing so, the present study responds to calls to study unchallenged deception, contributes new insights to an evolving critical social (dramaturgical) analysis of sports work, and raises important questions for the preparation and continuing professional development of the sporting workforce.
Within sport environments, athletes are exposed to norms that circulate limited discourses about the body and food, which contributes to the high prevalence of eating disorders (EDs) and hinders diagnosis, treatment and recovery. Discourses that challenge narrow sport-related discourses can expand perceptions of sporting success and athlete wellbeing, supporting ED recovery. In recent years, news media brought public attention to EDs in sport and a need for safe sport efforts. Since ED recovery often involves identity reconstruction, a process that can be facilitated within broader safe sport developments, this study examined dominant discourses surrounding ED recovery among athletes as presented in news media, and how such discourses frame identity. We used the NexisUni Academic database to collect news articles published from 1 January 2021 to 7 June 2022 and performed a critical discourse analysis of 80 articles. We identified an overarching journalistic discourse of ED recovery, where certain meanings of recovery centred around self-regulation and monitoring, while other meanings captured athletes' expanding relationships with their bodies, food, and self. Underlying this discourse was four subject positions that encapsulated varying ways in which athletes were portrayed as 'unrecoverable' or recovered: the entrenched athlete, the quasi-recovered athlete, the empowered athlete, and the liberated human. Our findings reveal tensions in portrayals of whether and how embodied experiences of ED recovery can be achieved in sport. Since news media can influence systemic action towards addressing EDs, this study holds implications for how ED recovery is discussed in sport contexts.
The Women's Australian Football League (AFLW) operates within a broader expansion of women's sport, yet players continue to navigate a landscape shaped by structural inequities and male-oriented cultural norms. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with five current and former players, this paper examines how organisational and socio-cultural factors shape AFLW players' experiences and the league's development. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, enabling close attention to participants' lived experiences and the relational dynamics through which inequality is produced and normalised. Three overarching themes were generated, capturing tensions between gratitude for inclusion, persistent structural limitations, and players' desire for recognition of the league's broader social and cultural values. The findings demonstrate how exclusionary organisational norms constrain player experiences and delimit the perceived legitimacy of women's Australian Rules football.
The primary aim of this study is to outline a process of how to develop co-produced, realist-informed theory-driven stories of change (SoC), to evaluate how an Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach can underpin an intervention strategy to effectively promote physical activity when working together with a community. The secondary aim is to utilise this SoC as a knowledge mobilisation tool by developing a video documentary to illustrate how the developed theory has been applied in practice. Eight stakeholders partook in focus groups or individual interviews to reflect on initial theories of change identified from a previous phase of the evaluation process, which included realist-informed workshops with over 70 participants. A reflexive thematic analysis, informed by realist programme theories, was conducted. Eleven themes were developed to underpin the dialogue and production of the video documentary, relating to four main headings outlining the key roles of the stakeholders involved. The documentary starts with the 'School: A Ready-Made Community' moving towards the role of the 'Police: Becoming an Ally', then focusing on the 'Council: Bringing the System Together' and finishing with the 'Community Developers: The People on the Ground'. Our findings explored an innovative, realist-informed process of how SoC can be used within participatory approaches to evaluate and evidence the process of social change to stakeholders. Furthermore, our study highlights how such SoC have the potential to be used as a knowledge mobilisation tool that could impact policy and practice development to promote physical activity.
This study explores how survivors of a mass violence event at a music festival engaged in Krav Maga training as a form of embodied recovery. Through in-depth interviews with six participants (three women and three men), we examined how intensive combat training became a way to feel alive again, physically, emotionally, and socially. The findings reveal that Krav Maga functioned not merely as self-defence, but as an existential response to a shattered sense of safety and reality. Four interwoven themes illuminate this process: physical readiness for future threat; reclaiming vitality through high-intensity effort; emotional expression through movement; and the training group as a raw, informal capsule of mutual healing. In this environment, participants found resonance, trust, and connection. As they pushed through exhaustion and physical challenge, participants began to renegotiate their embodied relationship with fear, pain, and presence. Within this transformative process, Krav Maga emerged as a medium through which survivors could reorient themselves towards vitality, agency, and connection. The study contributes to trauma and somatic recovery research by highlighting the potential of high-intensity training as a bridge between rupture and repair.
Media studies of older Olympic athlete mothers (i.e. 30+ years, multiple Games appearances) show that their post-partum returns to sport are often portrayed as exceptional and/or symbolic of progress. Researchers have problematised how media narratives reproduce tensions concerning ageism, inequality, and good motherhood for these athlete mothers. This study builds on these findings by examining how the British sport media context portrayed British rower Helen Glover's second Olympic comeback as a mother at age 38, to the Paris 2024 Games. Feminist narrative inquiry was used to theorise media stories contextualised by narratives shaping content and meanings of her comeback journey. A thematic narrative analysis of 59 stories contextualised by 93 images identified a narrative theme of 'challenging the status quo' shaped by two storylines threading media: 'Glover as disruptor and changemaker' and 'personal growth and change'. These storylines upheld neoliberal feminist values that centre individual responsibility and resilience for post-partum comebacks, while overlooking structural support for athlete mothers' career longevity. Our narrative analysis shows how media stories resist and reproduce gendered, ageist and intensive mothering ideologies, along with empowerment and celebration of one athlete mother's return. These findings illustrate how socially constructed motherhood is changing in media stories via narratives shaping them, while upholding a neoliberal status quo.
Esports coaches have become a prominent feature of the esports landscape, yet currently not much is known about esports coaching practices, research, and education. Consequently, esports coaches have had to navigate their development in the absence of standardised pathways and a context-specific research base. There is much we can learn from the organic evolution of esports coaching practice, so we used narrative inquiry to understand the processes and resources esports coaches' employ in shaping their careers and development. Narrative interviews were conducted to collect the stories from 11 professional esports coaches (10 men, 1 woman) and were analysed using creative analytic practices (CAP). Thematic narrative analysis informed our construction of four creative non-fiction vignettes that portrayed the current sociocultural performance of the role, 'esports coach', and highlighted the (un)available resources affording personal and professional development. We reflect on our CAP by offering a response to the stories that are situated within existing literature on esports and traditional sports coaching, with implications for coach education in esports and the wider esports industry. To our knowledge, this study was the first to apply a creative-non-fiction approach to the experience of esports coaching.
Debates about the Sport for Development (SfD) sector often centre on the lack of robust evidence supporting its effectiveness, positioning programme evaluation as central to knowledge production within SfD. Yet, the sociolinguistic dimensions of evaluation in SfD remain largely under-explored. This paper addresses this gap by examining the use of languages in SfD evaluation shapes knowledge production. Drawing on organisational ethnography conducted as an embedded monitoring and evaluation consultant within a sport-for-sexual-health programme in C & ocirc;te d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, data were generated through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with a focus on the linguistic dimensions of evaluation practice. Thematic analysis was conducted through iterative cycles of coding and memo writing. Findings show that monolingualism underpins SfD evaluation practices, undermining the aims of quantitative measurement and comparability associated with dominant positivist approaches. Moreover, SfD practitioners are constrained by prevailing monolingual structures when attempting to adapt evaluation strategies to the multilingual realities of the Global South contexts in which they operate. Such findings demonstrate the need to rethink M&E away from comparability and towards contextually grounded approaches. By framing language as a central epistemic factor to the production of knowledge through evaluation, this paper seeks to open a new space for SfD scholarship seeking to critically analyse evaluation as a vehicle of knowledge production.
Parents who coach their children play a key role in facilitating organised community youth sport participation, and parenting behaviour can have notable effects on youth sport motivation. Yet little is known about the factors influencing parent-coaches' behaviours. Embedded in self-determination theory, this study qualitatively explored the antecedents of parent-coaches' need-supportive, -depriving and -thwarting behaviours to generate insight on training and support measures for parent-coaches that could help improve the quality of community youth sport participants' motivational outcomes. Eight male community youth football parent-coaches participated in coach observations, interviews and focus groups over 5 months. Through reflexive thematic analysis, three major themes were developed: parent-coaches are not a blank slate - biographies influence coaching behaviours; the social context exacerbates parent-coaches' challenges with managing the dual role; and coach's child is stuck in the middle between parent-coach and teammates. The parent-coaches' experiences were illustrated through a creative non-fiction story using a composite character named Dennis. The findings and story offer explanations for parent-coaches' behaviours and shed light on the emotionality and interpersonal challenges of being a parent-coach.
Sport often presents itself as a level playing field. Yet for many LGBTQ+ people it remains a space where inclusion and exclusion sit side by side. Within this landscape, lesbian coaches are central to women's sport but remain largely overlooked in research. The purpose of this study is to examine how lesbian coaches in Spain learn to become coaches and how identity, power and place shape that learning. Guided by Ahmed's queer phenomenology, we explore how coaching pathways are felt and negotiated. We conducted semi-structured interviews with sixteen cisgender lesbian coaches in Spain, each with at least five years of coaching experience across different sports and levels. The data were analysed through an iterative process that moved from tensions in the data, to relational mapping, to abductive engagement with theory. Findings trace three movements. 'The narrow corridor' shows how entering elite men's sport offers resources yet leaves them feeling out of place through sexism, homophobia and constant self-calibration. 'Empowering spaces' illustrates how women-led, values-driven environments realign identity and practice. 'Passing it on' highlights how these experiences foster leadership, as coaches build inclusive programmes, hire women staff and sometimes return to old institutions as agents of change. Becoming a coach emerges not only as skill acquisition but as navigating atmospheres that enable or constrain who one can be. For sport coaching, this reframes coach development as a question of climate and leadership, opening pathways for those long needed yet resisted.
This study examines how elite track and field athletes who advocate for clean sport understand the role of sponsorship in shaping integrity within a commercialised sport context. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative approach, we conducted a secondary analysis of 12 publicly available episodes from the Clean Sport Collective podcast, in which athletes reflect on sponsorship, professionalisation, and ethical challenges in elite sport. Using reflexive thematic analysis, four themes were generated: (1) the impact of commercial pressures on athletes' lived experiences, (2) how sponsorship structures shape perceived performance expectations and doping vulnerabilities, (3) the perceived risks and constraints associated with speaking publicly about doping and other integrity-related concerns, and (4) alternative sponsorship models that prioritise athlete wellbeing. Athletes frequently referenced doping as one salient integrity concern, positioning it as a moral and economic injustice that undermines sporting competition, while also expressing concern about reputational and contractual consequences of addressing integrity issues in public forums. Athletes did not describe personal intentions to use prohibited substances; rather, they articulated how commercial and sponsorship environments can create ethical tensions that disproportionately disadvantage those committed to clean sport. Collectively, the findings highlight the vulnerabilities of athletes within elite sport as they navigate sponsorship systems and point to the potential for sponsors to play a more active role in fostering ethical practice and clean sport cultures.
Current research on ageing and physical activity largely centres on low-intensity, function-oriented programmes, overlooking the potential of high-challenge sport as a form of 'existential work' in later life. This study examines how older novices in a structured non-motorised competitive sailing programme transition from motivational regulation to existential meaning. Using a relativist ontology and a social constructionist epistemology, we conducted in-depth interviews with eight novices (aged 60-65) who completed a six-month regatta-focused training regimen and analysed the data through reflexive thematic analysis. Three themes emerged. First, embodied shift: carnal resistance - pain, bruising and seasickness - was reframed as evidence of agency, countering decline narratives. Second, competition as an existential boundary: the uncontrollable sailing environment was narrated as bringing participants to confront finitude. Third, ontological reframing through active surrender: older novices rewrote their self-narratives from passive tourists to agentic competitors, reframing their remaining years into a grand-tour-like voyage. Overall, motivation oriented action, whereas meaning was negotiated through participants' interpretations of embodied and environmental limits. Under favourable conditions, purposeful striving sustained engagement; under adverse conditions, participants moved beyond purpose, opening up the possibility for a shift towards existential being. These flexible responses illustrate how high-challenge sport can help older novices reimagine ageing as a field of existential possibility rather than mere functional maintenance.
This arts-based autoethnography centres on the lived experiences of a mother athlete returning to high-performance sport more than a decade after a career as an international medal-winning swimmer. Applying McCall's intracategorical intersectional framework, it explores the intersections of age, motherhood, and embodied trauma, as experienced in an elite context where past harms occurred. Using poetic and visual methods (i.e. drawings), this study captures how the mother body, aging body, and trauma body intersect and are negotiated within a culture dominated by ideals of youth, performance, and bodily perfection. The absence of mother athletes contributed to isolation, and the purposeful suppression of motherhood identity to conform to dominant norms. Rather than framing the athletic comeback as a return to a former self, this research highlights how past and present experiences intertwine in temporal, embodied, and relational ways, shaping identity, agency, and belonging. Methodologically, this study demonstrates how arts-based autoethnography can advance research on mother athletes in high-performance sport, making visible underexplored positions and structural dynamics that influence inclusion, marginalisation, and the negotiation of elite sporting careers.
Skilled monitoring of player behaviour, using varied communication styles and reflexivity in interactions are linked to expertise in sports officials. However, insight into interaction dynamics between players and officials is limited, particularly from the players' perspective. A situated player perspective challenges assumptions that players primarily rely on stable social cues about officials. To address this, video-led self-confrontation interviews were conducted with six semi-professional rugby team captains (Mage = 24.8 years; Mexp = 2.5 years) post-match to explore their unfolding, lived experiences and identify salient cues and preoccupations guiding their interactions with the central referee. A micro-phenomenological approach was used to access the pre-reflexive dimension of experience, capturing aspects of interaction not typically documented. An abductive, iterative analysis further supported interpretation by considering generative mechanisms shaping captains' preoccupations. Three common preoccupations emerged: (a) making sense of the referee's priorities based on ongoing match events; (b) attempting to influence the referee's perception of future events when inconsistent with the captain's own perception and (c) enacting captaincy status to negotiate influence or assert role claims when perceived as violated or strategically useful. Findings show that captains' communication with referees is guided by spontaneously emerging cues and concerns, illustrating that interaction is an emergent, relational process co-constructed with players. These results demonstrate how understanding players' situated perspectives could enhance officiating training by improving officials' ability to respond to unfolding match dynamics and suggest that micro-phenomenological methods can provide unique insights into the pre-reflexive dimensions of high-stakes, fast-paced interactions.
Conversation Analysis (CA) has increasingly been recognised as a valuable qualitative approach for examining interactional practices in sport and exercise contexts, yet it remains methodologically marginal within Sport and Exercise Sciences (SES). This paper aims to broaden our understanding of what CA is, what it offers, and how it contributes to advancing qualitative research and practice in SES. We introduce CA's core principles and analytic commitments, distinguishing it from other qualitative approaches commonly used in the field, including reflexive thematic analysis, narrative analysis, and critical discourse analysis. Drawing on existing CA-informed studies, we demonstrate the potential of focusing on how interactional practices central to sport and exercise - such as coaching, instruction, feedback, identity work, embodiment, and the negotiation of power - are accomplished in real time through talk and embodied conduct. Building on this review, we outline a forward-looking agenda for CA in SES, identifying opportunities for expanding empirical contexts beyond elite sport, strengthening co-produced and participatory approaches, advancing multimodal and embodied analyses, and addressing ethical and practical challenges associated with naturalistic data collection. We argue that CA does not seek to replace existing qualitative traditions in SES but adds a distinctive interactional dimension that complements them. By embracing CA's emic, fine-grained analysis of naturally occurring interaction, SES scholars can deepen theoretical understanding, enhance applied relevance, and contribute to more inclusive, socially just, and practice-oriented research.
