This study examined the effectiveness of a prevention intervention program to lower the incidence of injury for soccer players with at-risk psychosocial profiles. The Sport Anxiety Scale, the Life Event Scale for Collegiate Athletes, and the Athletic Coping Skills Inventory-28 were used to screen for psychosocial risk factors outlined in the stress and injury model (Williams & Andersen, 1998). Thirty-two high injury-risk players were identified and randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Injuries of participants were reported by their coaches. The intervention program consisted of training in 6 mental skills distributed in 6 to 8 sessions during 19 weeks of the competitive season. The results showed that the brief intervention prevention program significantly lowered the number of injuries in the treatment group compared with the control group.

The study was aimed at developing the empirical career model of Swedish professional handball players by means of exploring their career experiences in athletic and non-athletic developments through the lens of the holistic athletic career model. Eighteen Swedish professional handball players (nine men and nine women), who had recently terminated or were finishing their careers took part in semi-structured interviews about their careers from the beginning to the end with an interest in both athletic and non-athletic developments. Thematic analysis initially focused on identifying the handball career structure (i.e. stages and sub-stages). Then, the interviews were analysed inductively to identify shared themes in the players' experiences relevant to each career stage. These themes were incorporated in the relevant stages, and the empirical career model of Swedish professional handball players (furtherthe empirical model) was finalised. The empirical model describes careers of Swedish handball players as having four athletic stagesinitiation, development (with three sub-stages), mastery (with four sub-stages), and discontinuationcomplemented by players' psychological, psychosocial, academic/vocational, and financial developments. Each stage is also aligned with age markers and contains themes describing players' career experiences from the holistic perspective. The empirical model contributes to contextualised career research and serves as a basis for developing career-long psychological support services in Swedish handball including player/coach/parent education organised by the Swedish Handball Federation.

Although it is advocated that end-users are engaged in developing evidence-based injury prevention training to enhance the implementation, this rarely happens. The ‘Implementing injury Prevention training ROutines in TEams and Clubs in youth Team handball (I-PROTECT)’ uses an ecological participatory design incorporating the perspectives of multiple stakeholders throughout the project. Within the I-PROTECT project, the current study aimed to describe the development of holistic injury prevention training specifically for youth handball players through using knowledge from both end-users (coaches and players) and researchers/handball experts. Employing action evaluation within participatory action research, the cyclical development process included three phases: research team preparation, handball expert-based preparation and end-user evaluation to develop injury prevention training incorporating both physical and psychological perspectives. To grow the knowledge of the interdisciplinary research team, rethinking was conducted within and between phases based on participants’ contributions. Researchers and end-users cocreated examples of handball-specific exercises, including injury prevention physical principles (movement technique for upper and lower extremities, respectively, and muscle strength) combined with psychological aspects (increase end-user motivation, task focus and body awareness) to integrate into warm-up and skills training within handball practice. A cyclical development process that engaged researchers/handball experts and end-users to cocreate evidence-based, theory-informed and context-specific injury prevention training specifically for youth handball players generated a first pilot version of exercises including physical principles combined with psychological aspects to be integrated within handball practice.

The aim of this study was to describe gender-specific career paths of Swedish professional handball players. A reanalysis of Ekengren et al. (2018) career interviews with nine male and nine female players led to creating two composite vignettes using the athletes' own words, accounted for typical features in the male and female players' career paths. Seven themes were identified in the analysis of the men's transcripts and eight themes derived from the women's transcripts. Further, the themes of both vignettes were aligned with career stages described in our previous study (Ekengren et al. 2018). The male players' vignette is interpreted as a performance narrative congruent with elite handball culture that promotes performance success and profitable professional contracts. The female players' vignette is more holistic, embracing handball, studies, motherhood, and how they ought to be as Swedish women. Recommendations for future research are provided.The current study is a part of a project focusing on career development in Swedish handball. In our previous study (Ekengren et al. 2018), 18 Swedish professional handball players (nine females) were interviewed about their careers with foci on stages and transitions in their athletic and non-athletic developments. Their data were consolidated into the Empirical Career Model of Swedish professional Handball players (ECM-H) using the holistic athletic career model (Wylleman, Reints, and De Knop 2013) as a template. The ECM-H describes four athletic stages -initiation, development (with three sub-stages), mastery (with four sub-stages), and discontinuation -complemented by stages in five layers relevant to: Swedish handball settings, psychological, psychosocial, academic/vocational, and financial developments. When creating the empirical model, gender-specific features of the players' careers became apparent and of interest for further investigation. We decided to complement ECM-H by descriptions of gender-specific career paths and to make a gender-related reanalysis of the same transcripts but using a different perspective in the data treatment and presentation. The perspective taken in this study is a narrative inquiry in the form of constructing composite vignettes based on the male and female participants' career stories. Our whole project is inspired by the cultural praxis of athletes' careers paradigm encouragingthis is an open Access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons Attribution-noncommercial-noDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

The authors of this paper share how they developed and validated an applied framework termed the career-long psychological support services in Swedish handball (CPS-H). The CPS-H is grounded in career research within Swedish handball and examples of efficient career assistance practice complemented by applied experiences of the first author. The authors used a heuristic approach to sketch the CPS-H initial version, which later was validated in three focus groups with end-users (handball players, coaches, and sport psychology practitioners) and transformed into the validated CPS-H. Promoting a combination of the proactive, educational, whole career, whole environment, and whole person approaches, the framework is structured as having interrelated parts addressing questions: where (changes in the contexts), when (ages, career stages), what (athletes' needs and potential working issues), who (support providers), why (philosophy shared by the stakeholders), and how (forms of services) of psychological support. The authors further reflect on the CPS-H and its implementation and provide general and stage-specific recommendations for support providers. Although the CPS-H is contextualized in a specific sport and culture, some lessons can be applicable across countries and sport boarders.