To Örebro University

This commentary is distinctly personal for us. We think it should be likewise for all scholars, leaders and organisers involved in youth sport. This is because, to our minds, at the core of most people's ways of approaching and promoting these supposedly healthy activities to children and young adults, is an apparent well-meaningness which centres on wanting the best for current and future generations. Unfortunately, while we accept such good intentions are present, they do not negate the empirical reality that critical scholars of sport have been pointing towards for over five decades - that is, professional and performance focused sports are often socially, politically and ethically questionable enterprises. If central features of our argument in this direction are accepted, several problems in terms of children's rights, health, and wellbeing become apparent as quite fundamental to the model of sport which is currently dominant in the Western imagination. To offer a path forward we outlined a focus on human development as the foundation upon which we build a series of clear recommendations. We conclude with the purposely pithy, populist and powerful statement that encouraging players to play, rather than thinking of sport as akin to work, should not be understood as some impossible task, but rather, a return to the ways that many of us were first drawn to the amazing potentials embedded in 'sport'. We compel scholars to reflect deeply on their place in the subcultures we critique, and if after doing so, they find themselves complicit in maintaining a world of sport that damages young people, contributes to them dropping out, and otherwise reduces the fun, enjoyment and positive development they gain from physical activity, we hope they will join us in being part of the solution rather than continuing to be central to the problem.

Global education is a priority in the Higher Education (HE) system of all nations. In sport degree programmes in HE, the internationalisation trend is also noticeable. However, working in transnational education settings may bring to light, and generate existential and pedagogical contemplation of some of the foundational principles and assumptions about effective teaching. This paper aims to extend theoretical understanding of the confluence of internationalisation and educational modalities to fostering critical thinking. And, illustrate how building language-sensitivities in variable delivery may yield effects upon positive classroom experiences and establishing a 'safe' space for communication and learner-informed/learner-led dialogue. Based on a case study of a safe sport education programme for university student-athletes in Lithuania, this paper features a narrative that amalgamates: (1) descriptions of the practical context, session structure and delivery; (2) reflections on the sessions from the lead author; and, (3) focus group data from student participants. The case presented reveals that irrespective of an educator's efforts to acculturate to the distinct context, continued uncertainties regarding the teaching environment, language and cultural differences, and learners' understandings of subject content remained perennial concerns. Such issues necessitated adopting careful session design that incorporated a breadth of methods to make students' experiences more meaningful and inclusive. Key here was the consideration of language and conceptual assumptions (e.g. vis-a-vis 'safe' sport), and wider Western-hegemonic frameworks of what sport is/is not. The analysis illustrates how efforts to consider language, use student-co-creation and blended learning can be effective in generating a comfortable space for interaction, communication and learning. Thus, this paper contributes to continuing debates on transnational education, internationalisation in HE and roles sport content may play in generating global dialogue on critical contemporary issues.

Women's artistic gymnastics (WAG) recently gained mainstream media attention as a sport that physically, psychologically, and sexually abuses gymnasts. Since the 1980s, WAG scholarship has documented such practices and the devastating consequences they have for gymnasts. In this chapter, I present the qualitative research project: #gymnastalliance: An international study on women's gymnasts speaking out about abuse, which aimed to understand the process and experiences of recognising and disclosing abuse later in live. To achieve this, I purposefully recruited 19 former gymnasts, aged 20 and 50 years, who, through individual semi-structured online interviews, shared with me their experiences of speaking out about the physical, psychological, and sexual abuse they were subjected to when participating in women's gymnastics. Drawing on five trauma-informed research guidelines for qualitative research, I reflect on how I have attempted to (1) recognise women's gymnasts' trauma events, experiences, and effects; (2) prevent the inadvertent (re)traumatisation of the research participants; and (3) manage possible negative reactions to the research process and findings.

The USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal raised global awareness about child sexual abuse (CSA) in women's artistic gymnastics. The ensuing media coverage also centre-staged victims’ survivorship stories, a process that for many moved from dissociating, recognising and disclosing CSA to feeling comfort when connecting with survivors and accepting CSA as part of their life history. However, scholarship on what survivorship from CSA in sport entails, and importantly, what it means to athletes, is limited. In this article, we frame the survival of CSA using Arthur Frank’s socio-narratological conceptualisation of people being able to process the devastating consequences of a life-threatening and/or a life-altering event, and present the survivorship stories of two former gymnasts, Maria and Lucia (pseudonyms). For these two women, survivorship was facilitated by hearing others’ stories of sexual abuse, purposefully facing their CSA experiences and connecting with one another later in life to raise awareness about sexual abuse in sport. Thus, in addition to presenting Maria and Lucia's stories for the purpose of providing CSA victims with a survivorship narrative, we outline and reflect on the role hearing and telling stories have in CSA survivorship.

Stories of body shaming in sports coaching are becoming widespread, and can intentionally, unintentionally, or inadvertently be used in different sports coaching practices. These practices do not necessarily intend to harm athletes. The aim of this paper is to explore body critical and body sensitive sport coaching practices that have the potential to be shaming, or as we call it in the title, the ‘anatomy’ of body shaming. The study used photo elicitation interviews including vignettes for data generation with 12 coaches from nine different sports. The results demonstrate that body criticality and body sensitivity function in different subtle ways and that coaches were well-aware of the potentially damaging influence that they can have on athletes. The article concludes with recommendations for further research exploring how athletes experience the most subtle and invisible ways of body critical and body sensitive practices, and how they internalize this well-intended but still potentially shaming advice.

Non-accidental violence in women’s gymnastics has gained significant attention, and is a sport where gender is clearly differentiated. Despite the volume of gymnastics research on these themes it seemingly had little impact in preventing harm. We conducted a critical interpretative synthesis of 45 articles to reexamine the literature for understanding of, and connections between, gender and violence. We found that where gender viewed as a structure was explicit, violence was not. Conversely where violence was explicit, gender was implicit and viewed in individualist terms. Only one article explicitly connected gender and violence recognizing violence as a gendered outcome. We encourage researchers to incorporate gender as a structure in analytical inquiries and identify the wider contexts and associated mechanisms through which gender intersects with violence. Doing so can help to develop prevention measures that align with international definitions of gender-based violence.

Athletes who aim to qualify for the Olympic Games need to stay healthy. Research demonstrates, however, that many elite athletes take health risks to achieve sporting success. Drawing on social ecological thinking, the purpose of this study is to understand change in athlete health behaviour during the Olympic Games qualification phase. We draw on data from a six-month-long case study on four athletes who aimed to qualify for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. We used semi-structured interviews and weekly-online surveys to collect data. Olympic hopefuls engaged in both risky health behaviour, such as ‘competing while injured’, and in self-caring health behaviour, such as ‘balanced dietary management’. Risk-taking was encouraged by a habit of taking pain medication, insufficient medical support, and time pressure to qualify. Awareness for self-care, a trusting coach-athlete relationship, and a well-rounded athlete support programme were factors that promoted self-care. Conceptually, we found that athlete health behaviour is dynamic and ecological, that is, it is relational to personal, contextual, and temporal factors. Based on the findings, we advise Olympic hopefuls to surround themselves with people who support caring health behaviour, and that sport organisations and stakeholders adopt long-term planning and implement policies of care.

Despite increased recognition that a higher education sports coaching qualification plays an important role in shaping coaches' ethical decision-making, few scholars have considered what ethics to teach and how best to deliver such curriculum. Examples of actual ethics courses are particularly amiss. This article furthers scholarship on ethics education by introducing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), a pedagogical perspective and approach that is employed to teach quality of mind competences considered necessary to make ethical decisions. To demonstrate how ESD can be translated into ethics curriculum, we present the university course "IIG206 Sustainable Sports Coaching", which the authors delivered to coaching students, and outline how the course offered students' opportunities to develop quality of mind competences, including "thinking on their feet", complexity thinking, working interdisciplinarily, creativity, and "thinking outside the box". Practical recommendations for scholars keen to create and deliver ethics education in coaching education conclude the article.

BACKGROUND: To understand and prevent sport injuries, scholars have employed different scientific approaches and research methods. Traditionally, this research has been monodisciplinary, relying on one subdiscipline of sport science and applying qualitative or quantitative research methods. Recently, scholars have argued that traditional approaches fail to address contextual components of sport and the nonlinear interactions between different aspects in and around the athlete, and, as a way forward, called for alternative approaches to sport injury research. Discussion of alternative approaches are today taking place, however, practical examples that demonstrate what such approaches entails are rare. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to draw on an interdisciplinary research approach to (1) outline an interdisciplinary case analysis procedure (ICAP); and (2) provide an example for future interdisciplinary sport injury research.

METHODS: We adopt an established definition and application of interdisciplinary research to develop and pilot the ICAP for interdisciplinary sport injury teams aiming to integrate qualitative and quantitative sport injury data. The development and piloting of ICAP was possible by drawing on work conducted in the interdisciplinary research project "Injury-free children and adolescents: Towards better practice in Swedish football" (the FIT project).

RESULTS: The ICAP guides interdisciplinary sport injury teams through three stages: 1. Create a more comprehensive understanding of sport injury aetiology by drawing on existing knowledge from multiple scientific perspectives; 2. Collate analysed qualitative and quantitative sport injury data into a multilevel data catalogue; and 3. Engage in an integrated discussion of the collated data in the interdisciplinary research team.

CONCLUSION: The ICAP is a practical example of how an interdisciplinary team of sport injury scholars can approach the complex problem of sport injury aetiology and work to integrate qualitative and quantitative data through three stages. The ICAP is a step towards overcoming the obstacles of integrating qualitative and quantitative methods and data that scholars have identified.