Composite vignettes of Swedish male and female professional handball players’ career paths

Abstract

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.

Identification of key career indicators in Portuguese football players

“…Regarding the mastery stage, in handball 20 and in NHL, 21 it was highlighted that the mastery stage is characterized by four major career stages related to the level of performance of practice (i.e. access to semi-professional or professional sport, developing as a professional player, reaching the elite, and maintaining the professional status).…”

“…Both studies reinforce that the mastery stage lies between the normative transitions from junior to senior and retirement and integrates different non-normative transitions that players face during their senior career. 20 During all the stages, and particularly in the mastery stage, the athletic path is nonlinear and subtle changes in the career development could potentiate unexpected career paths. 18 Likewise, it was stated that career pathways were not consciously defined along with the career 12 and did not consider a previous plan of development, in line with the reported in football.…”

Toward the Career-Long Psychological Support Services: Insights from Swedish Handball

“…We also relied on good practice examples from career assistance literature (e.g., Torregrossa et al, 2020). These mentioned models and frameworks were combined with major findings from our research project on career development in Swedish handball (Ekengren et al 2018;Ekengren, Stambulova, Johnson, Carlsson, et al 2020) to heuristically develop the initial version of the CPS-H. The first sketch of the CPS-H was discussed, challenged, and revised several times within the author group until we were basically satisfied with the structure.…”

“…We started the project by studying (whole) career experiences of Swedish handball players (Ekengren et al 2018;Ekengren, Stambulova, Johnson, Carlsson, et al 2020), proceeded with development and validation of the career-long psychological support system (from now the CPS-H) in Swedish handball (i.e., the focus of this paper), which then was tested in (so far) one intervention study (Ekengren, Stambulova, Johnson, Ivarsson, et al 2020).…”

Identity tensions in dual career: the discursive construction of future selves by female Finnish judo athletes

“…Other scholars have alerted us to the effects of neoliberal understandings that hold the individual solely responsible for navigating the demands of education and career (Brunila et al 2011;Holmegaard, Ulriksen, and Madsen 2014;Leccardi 2014;Pless 2014) and instead emphasise the role of the cultural and discursive contexts in athletes' ability or inability to plan for the future (Cosh, Crabb, and Tully 2015;Ronkainen and Ryba 2018;Ryba and Wright 2010;Skrubbeltrang 2018;Skrubbeltrang et al 2018). It has been suggested that young peoples' aspirations are influenced by narratives of gender (Ekengren et al 2019;Skrubbeltrang 2018) and age (Henriksen and Mortensen 2014) as well as by the dominant belief systems, values, practices, and policy discourses that circulate in their national contexts (Leccardi 2014;Pless 2014).…”