Friendship and competition-

high school girls experience of competitive sport

• The aim of this study is to describe the experiences ten high school girls have of organised sport and try to understand how these experiences form their motivation for physical activity

• Why did they get involved in organised, competitive sport?

• Why did they continue to be involved and why did they drop out?

• How physically active are they today?

• The ten girls were members of the same basketball team för seven years.

• When the team split their involvement in sport and physical activity, took different directions.

• Their experiences are collected through qualitative interviews and are analysed wuth the help of life-world phenomenology.

Some concepts within the theoretical frame that is of importance• Lifeworld is the world in which we live our daily lives in

interaction with other people and things.• The lived body is the body and soul as inseparable units.• Movement is important, because we discover our life world by

moving our lived bodies in communication with other people and things

• Habit is a movement that is incorporated in the body and that we don’t have to think of when we perform.

• A thing as a car, a bicycle or a basketball can also be incorporated in the lived body and become ahabit

Swedish club sport för children and youthSport is considered a tool to enhance the physical activity in a lifelong perspective.

• Almost 90 % of Swedish children and youth have sometimes been a member in organised sport.

• Boys are generally more active within the sport clubs than girls. • In the town were these girls lived, girls involvement in sport is

almost as high as the boys and is higher than boys in three other cities in Sweden. (Nilsson,1998.,Larsson, 2008).

• The view of the body within sport is dualistic . The body as a tool to achieve good results and win the competition.

Interviews

• The girls were interviewed at the age of 17.• They had experiences of physical activities through 12 years of

physical education and health in school and a minimum 8 years of basketball practice within in the same team.

• Most of them had also experiences from other sport activities as soccer, gymnastics, riding, skating etc.

Three themes concluded the girls experiences

• Friendship and competition : explained why did they got involved in organised, competitive sport?

• Pushes and rewards: explained why they enjoyed sport activities and why did they drop out?

• Sport girl or life enjoyer expressed how they characterised themselves today in relation to physical activity.

Friendship

Friends was a reason to participate even if the interest in sport was moderate -“ I don’t know. I think it was such a group thing. I wasn’t that interested, it was more for the friendship. (Girl 8).

To share their friends life-world was the main reason when they started to play basketball

” I started to play basketball because my friends played..”(Girl 5)• 

•and over time this life world made their relation to each other stronger.

Competition

Was an important reason for participating in sport activities-” I feel good when I compete. I want to, I am competing in everything I do. (Girl 2)

Another girl said-”Because when I do sports then I only have to win. Yes I scored, then you really feel like this.” (Shows with her body expression) (Girl 7)and the competition also strengtened the friendship -“…as when we had a game, then we supported each other. We were really tough before the games.” (Girl 6).

Pushes

It was also important to have a coach pushing you, to make you participate in the activities. -“it is hard, it is not fun, no one pushes you, you know that you can quit whenever you want to. No one tells you that you have to practice one hour, it is not the same…(girl 6). .

-“It is nice to have a sport practice to go to, then you don’t need any more physical activity. You only go to that activity three times a week and then you are done with that weeks practice. That is perfect.”(Girl 8).

And to be “punished” for bad performance by running laps was motivating for most of the girls.

Rewards

It was rewarding to win the games, see the muscles grow but it was also rewarding to get sore aching muscles after a practice

•“ If you have aching muscles the day after practice , then you have the proof that you have trained your muscles. “(Girl 5). •-”I think aching muscles are enjoyable, because than you know that the training was successful, that is the way I think (Girl 4).

As well as be sweating. That was also a ”sign” that you had been physically active.

Sport girl and life enjoyer

Was how is examples of how they characterised themselves in relation to physical activity today. ” I have no will. My body doesn’t want to, or the body want to but my brain don’t want too .” ( Girl 8)

-”I don’t feel that pressure as all other women in our country” ( girl 10).

Some of the girls were still active within competetive sport and they thought they needed to be physically active, the others had no such need, but they knew that they should be active to avoid being fat.

Conclusion

• The girls seem to have incorporated a dualistic view of the body into their life world. The satisfaction of physical activity didn’t come from inside it was visible through biological reactions or sport performances.

• The girls that was inactive could not use their incorporated habits from many years experience of organised competitive sport in anew situation. It was difficult for them to expand their lifeworld to new experiences without friends, without a coach and without the well-known habits.

• The body and soul gave them different signals and they couldn’t integrate them.

A question to further discuss

• Is whether organised competitive sport really prepares our children and youth to a physically active lifestyle.

• it seems that some of the participants incorporate habits that is not useful when they drop out of their sport activity. Habits that they cannot easily transform to pysical activity outside their sport.

Thank you for listening

Inger Karlefors PhD.Inger.Karlefors@pedag.umu.se