An autoethnographic account and interpretation of sport related life skills and personal development

Abstract

ABSTRACT An authoethnographic case study of the first author’s personal experience of psychosocial development and life skills transfer across his high school sport experience and over his four-decade career as a sport psychology researcher and consultant is presented. Adopting a story-analytic and teller-mode approach, the first author (Dan) conveys and interprets his own story of personal and life skill development via sport and integrates his experiences with findings from qualitative interviews he conducted with nine classmates who were also varsity athletes in 1969 at the same high school [Gould et al., under review. Former scholastic athletes views of sport-based life skills learning: A 50 year retrospective study. Manuscript Submitted for Review]. The interviews were designed to describe and systematically analyse how Dan and his former classmates’ experiences resonate with the sport-based life skills development literature. Dan’s sport-related personal and life skill development story centred on six overarching themes. These included: (1) openness to personal development because of his drive to excel and need to feel worthy; (2) “not a Tabula Rasa athlete”; (3) coaches as mentors but his mother was his greatest influence; (4) high school sport helping make him who he is; (5) high school sport serving as an incubator for self-regulation and personal growth; and (6) depositing and withdrawing from his “experience bank” to help himself and help others over the course of his life. Dan’s experiences are interpreted relative to the existing personal and life skill sport-based development research and theory.