Female Roller Derby Athletes’ Athletic Identity and Systematic Pursuit of Leisure

Abstract

Athletic identity is a foundational element of an individual’s self-concept and affects psychological, social, and behavioral characteristics. The purpose of this study was to investigate a unique sport phenomenon, roller derby, by exploring the relationships between athletic identity of women athletes and serious leisure pursuit in the sport. Participants were 578 women registered with the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) who completed an online survey concerning their athletic identity. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that demographics (family income) was a minor predictor of participants’ serious leisure pursuit. Both internal and external components of athletic identity were positively associated with their level of serious leisure, while internal components (i.e. self-identity and positive affectivity) were stronger in predicting women athletes’ systematic leisure pursuit in roller derby than external ones. Results of this study provide support for exploring untraditional sport offerings for women, as findings suggest that roller derby provides an opportunity for women to enjoy a full-contact sport and develop identity as an athlete with strength and knowledge through their systematic leisure pursuit. The results of this study suggest offering promotion roller derby programs or other untraditional women sports to foster women’s engagement and greater commitment to sport, as well as to facilitate equality for women in sports.

Serious Leisure Perspectives in Sports: Professional Athletes’ Career Progress via Serious Leisure

“…Sport is also often a form of serious leisure (Stebbins.... 1992) that provides participants "small worlds" of social identification, opportunities for learning and developing skills, escape from monotonous and routine work, recognition for commitment and excellence, and a context for the expression of achievement motivations. Within the framework of serious leisure, a wide and diverse range of studies have been conducted over the past three decades with sports being one of the most popular activities in the domain of serious leisure, including master swimmers (Hastings, Kurth, Schloder, & Cyr, 1995) youth sports (Siegenthaler & Gonzalez, 1997) whitewater kayakers (Sherry & Bartram, 2001) dancers (Brown, 2007) cycling (O"Connor & Brown, 2010) playing chess (Gould et al, 2011) taekwondo participation (Kim, Dattilo, & Heo, 2011) amateur athletes (MacCosham, Patry, Beswick, & Gravelle, 2015) competition climbing (Gagnon, Stone, & Garst, 2015) runners (Ronkainen, Harrison, Shuman, & Ryba, 2017) female roller derby athletes (Liu, Baghurst, & Bradley, 2018) and different sets of athletes (Romero, Iraurgi, Madariaga, & Gould, 2020). These studies demonstrated a strong relationship between the serious leisure characteristics of athletes and their leisure involvement and dedication.…”