Search Results

Former student-athletes (SAs) experience unique barriers to maintaining their physical activity, such as loss of team support, less motivation without specific goals, and identity-related changes. Informed by a self-determination theory framework, the authors developed a 6-week Pilates-based intervention to support the physical and psychological wellness of SAs by fostering self-determined motivation and basic psychological needs satisfaction as they make the transition to physically active alumni. In this case study, the authors outline the development and implementation of the program with final-year SAs (N = 12) at a Division III institution. Feasibility was demonstrated through high adherence and positive participant feedback suggesting they valued their experiences in the program and felt more confident in pursuing new forms of physical activity beyond college sports. To extend this type of programming at other institutions, the authors recommend that sport psychology professionals consider unique institutional barriers and opportunities for supporting SAs in their transition to meaningful lifetime activity.

The online EdD in kinesiology at UNCG evolved from the face-to-face EdD, which was designed as an interdisciplinary doctoral degree tailored to working professionals in kinesiology. The new online EdD, which is the only online doctoral program in kinesiology, retains that broad, interdisciplinary curriculum and focuses on developing practicing scholars in kinesiology teaching, leadership, and advocacy. The fully-online EdD program faces many challenges, including technology issues, faculty buy-in, retention, and dissertation completion. To meet those challenges, the EdD curriculum is structured in a four-year cohort model, emphasizing collaboration and connections from the initial campus orientation session through the dissertation defense.

As part of the 40th anniversary of the publication of Brooks’s (1981) Perspectives on the Academic Discipline of Physical Education, the authors offer an update on the Sport Psychology chapter, including key developments, topics, and issues in sport and exercise psychology. They begin with an overview of the 1981 chapter and state of sport psychology as described during that time. Then, in the main part of the article, they go through each of the main topics as presented in the 1981 chapter—highlighting what’s gone, what’s stayed, what’s changed, and what’s new. In the final section, they discuss the current state of sport and exercise psychology and end with their aspirations for sport and exercise psychology.

There is growing interest in how athletes’ physical activity participation may be impacted when they transition out of competitive sport; however, few studies have examined the process of physical activity transitions in collegiate student-athletes using a qualitative approach. The purpose of our study was to explore student-athletes’ perceptions of, and experiences with, physical activity in the transition out of collegiate sport. Our analysis of transcripts from 13 focus groups conducted with current and former student-athletes (n = 59) suggests that student-athletes experienced a journey from control to liberation as they transitioned into their postcompetitive lives. In this exciting yet challenging transitional journey, participants were faced with navigating newfound autonomy over their physical activity outside of the controlled environment of collegiate sports and were considering the value and meaning of physical activity within a health promoting context. We offer practical recommendations from these findings to support student-athletes in this transition.

The Program for the Advancement of Girls and Women in Sport and Physical Activity (PAGWSPA) at University of North Carolina at Greensboro UNCG), in collaboration with the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport (NAGWS), hosted a joint National Conference on Girls and Women in Sport and Physical Activity on the UNCG campus, October 20-22, 2011. The conference brought together over 100 scholars, coaches, teachers, and students from across the country to share research, programs and relevant issues related to girls and women’s sport and physical activity. Reflecting the theme, “Discovering Strengths of Body and Mind,” the conference offered a wide variety of sessions including invited scholarly addresses, panel discussions, submitted research, program information, hands-on workshops and special events.

The following sections provide an overview of the conference, starting with summaries of the keynote presentations by Jan Todd, Nicole LaVoi and Carole Oglesby. The next sections provide summaries of the invited speakers, two panel sessions, and selected additional information. Brief bios for each of the invited speakers and panelists are provided at the end of the paper.

College athletes are at risk for heavy alcohol use, which jeopardizes their general health, academic standing, and athletic performance. Effective prevention programming reduces these risks by targeting theory-based intermediate factors that predict alcohol use while tailoring content to student-athletes. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the myPlaybook online prevention program on student-athletes’ social norms, negative alcohol expectancies, and intentions to use alcohol-related harm prevention strategies. NCAA Division II student-athletes were recruited from 60 institutions across the United States to complete myPlaybook and pretest/posttest surveys measuring demographics and targeted outcome variables. Participants were randomly assigned to the treatment group (pretest-program-posttest; final n = 647) or the delayed treatment “control” group (pretest-posttest-program; final n = 709). Results revealed significant program effects on social norms (p < .01) and intentions to use harm prevention strategies (p < .01), while the effect on negative alcohol expectancies was nonsignificant (p = .14). Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Heeding recent calls to capture dynamic variability of physical activity (PA) motivation within a self-determination theory framework, this study examined the extent to which psychological needs satisfaction in PA predicted subsequent PA, disaggregating within-person and between-persons data. University students (N = 89) wore an ActiGraph GT3X accelerometer for 6 days and reported basic psychological needs satisfaction daily. Multilevel models examined whether competence, autonomy, and relatedness for the previous day’s PA (>2,020 counts per minute) predicted the following day’s minutes of PA (>2,020 counts per minute), controlling for previous-day PA. Participants who, on average, reported greater feelings of autonomy and competence tended to engage in more minutes of PA the following day. When participants reported feeling greater relatedness than what was typical for them, they tended to engage in more PA the following day. Psychological needs vary day to day, but how and to what extent they predict PA depends on the specific need.