Stories of Sports Injury - Dr Ross Wadey (Pt1) - Meaningful Sport Series

For some athletes, it is the disjunctures in their sporting lives such as a sports injury that trigger deeper questions about meaning. But why are some athletes more vulnerable to a crisis when they experience a sporting injury, and how can sport psychology practitioners expand their understanding of the impact of injuries not only on athletes, but people around them?

In sport psychology, many efforts have been made to understand psychological factors and processes related to injury occurrence and experiences. For Dr Ross Wadey, a significant limitation of this work is that it has been largely been acontextual and focused on what goes on in the athlete's head. Therefore, he has advocated for a shift towards a more cultural and relational discourse and looking into the stories of athletes to understand how they make meaning of these experiences with the cultural narrative resources that are available to them. 

Ross Wadey is an Associate Professor in Sport Psychology at St Mary’s University. He has conducted extensive research on sports injuries and growth following adversity, which forms the focus of the second part of our conversation.

Ross is the editor of the recently published book Sport Injury Psychology: Cultural, Relational, Methodological, and Applied Considerations, which informs our conversations today.

We also discuss an exciting new article led by Ross's PhD student Ciera Everard titled Storying sports injury experiences of elite track athletes: A narrative analysis. 

You can find out more about Ross and his work here and follow him on Twitter @rosswadey