Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/26972
Title: “All I have to do is pass”: A discursive analysis of student athletes' talk about prioritising sport to the detriment of education to overcome stressors encountered in combining elite sport and tertiary education
Contributor(s): Cosh, Suzanne  (author)orcid ; Tully, Phillip J  (author)orcid 
Publication Date: 2014-03
Early Online Version: 2013-11-14
DOI: 10.1016/j.psychsport.2013.10.015
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/26972
Abstract: Objectives: Increasingly, athletes are expected to undertake tertiary education contemporaneously with their sporting careers. However, to do so may prove difficult and stressful. Exploration of the stressors encountered by student-athletes in combining the two pursuits is limited. There is also limited research examining whether combining the two pursuits impacts upon sporting or educational success. Design and method: A discursive psychological approach was employed, examining twenty interviews conducted with Australian athletes enrolled in tertiary education, exploring how athletes integrated sport and education. Results: Within the interviews, athletes constructed their primary academic goal as to ‘just pass’. Athletes repeatedly presented themselves as sacrificing educational success to integrate the two pursuits. Moreover, athletes constructed accounts of themselves as prioritising sport, but as passive in decision-making around priorities. In doing so, athletes produced accounts that removed their own agency for their sacrificed academic success. The interviewees also constructed time as a barrier to the successful integration of sport and education. In the dataset time was constructed either as fixed, limited and externally controlled, or as flexible and controllable. Conclusions: These alternate constructions allowed athletes to remove agency for poor educational outcomes, or conversely, enabled them to present themselves as successfully able to integrate sport and education. Thus, differing constructions of time were used to achieve different rhetorical ends. Implications and interventions for supporting student athletes successfully to combine sport and education are discussed.
Publication Type: Journal Article
Source of Publication: Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 15(2), p. 180-189
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Place of Publication: Netherlands
ISSN: 1878-5476
1469-0292
Fields of Research (FoR) 2008: 170114 Sport and Exercise Psychology
Fields of Research (FoR) 2020: 520107 Sport and exercise psychology
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2008: 920410 Mental Health
920599 Specific Population Health (excl. Indigenous Health) not elsewhere classified
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2020: 200409 Mental health
Peer Reviewed: Yes
HERDC Category Description: C1 Refereed Article in a Scholarly Journal
Appears in Collections:Journal Article
School of Psychology

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