Abstract
Engagement, burnout, and experiences are central concepts for understanding student-athlete adjustment in a dual career (DC) environment. As part of a larger 3-year, lower secondary sports schools pilot project, the aim of this study was to examine student-athletes’ DC adjustment in Finnish lower secondary sports schools at the end of the second academic year. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, we sought to (a) identify adjustment profiles among student-athletes based on measures of engagement and burnout in school and sport and (b) to extract experiences that describe the distribution of student-athletes in the profiles. A latent profile analysis using questionnaire data from a sample of 217 lower secondary student-athletes (M = 14 years, SD = 0.4 years) revealed three distinct profiles: well-adjusted (n = 122), reasonably functioning (n = 73), and struggling (n = 22). Follow-up interviews with a subsample of 19 student-athletes revealed that occasional physical exhaustion and school-related stress were common adjustment issues for student-athletes in all three profiles. Student-athletes showing the well-adjusted profile reported advanced DC management skills that enabled them to maintain low levels of burnout while engaging extensively in school and sport. Adolescents in the reasonably functioning profile reported difficulties in portioning time and thoughts between school and sport, which caused physical and mental DC taxation. To compensate for insufficient time management strategies, adolescents belonging to the struggling profile had to emancipate time for schoolwork by lowering their sports engagement at the cost of heightened school and sport burnout.
Highlights
Engagement, burnout, and experiences are central concepts for understanding student-athlete adjustment in a dual career (DC) environment
Students have been profiled based on combinations of engagement and burnout at various educational levels, including lower secondary school (Virtanen, Lerkkanen, et al, 2018), upper secondary school (Salmela-Aro & Upadaya, 2020), and tertiary education (Salmela-Aro & Read, 2017). These findings suggest that adolescence is not an identical time for school engagement or burnout (Tuominen-Soini & Salmela-Aro, 2014), because researchers have identified subgroups of students showing, for instance, a combination of high engagement and high burnout
It has been suggested that burnout might be the price of engaging fully in two time-consuming and wearing contexts (Gustafsson et al, 2011; Sorkkila, Aunola, & Ryba, 2017). Contradicting this notion, our results showed that student-athletes within the well-adjusted and reasonably functioning profiles who competed at the national level reported lower levels of burnout compared to student-athletes in the struggling profile competing at the local level
Summary
Engagement, burnout, and experiences are central concepts for understanding student-athlete adjustment in a dual career (DC) environment. The national project aimed to find solutions that allowed student-athletes the opportunity to practice their sports 6–10 h/week during school time in Grades 7–9 and to teach them the skills and strategies needed to combine sports with education during later stages of their athletic careers (Finnish Olympic Committee, 2020). Responding to the Finnish Olympic Committee’s need to evaluate the developing lower secondary sports schools to further improve DC support programs at these in stitutions, we examined student-athletes’ DC adjustment by focusing on burnout, engagement, and experiences using a two-phase mix ed-methods approach (Creswell et al, 2003). Lower secondary sports schools represent multilevel developmental environments encompassing symbiotic contexts stretching from macro (e.g., national policies) to micro (e.g., educational tasks) environments (Eccles & Roeser, 2011). Conse quently, unidimensional domain-focused experiences (Eccles & Roeser, 2011) and engagement with the athlete role in the absence of exploring other alternatives facilitates the development of burnout and dropout from sports (Moazami-Goodarzi et al, 2020; Torregrosa et al, 2015)
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