A psycho-educational curriculum for sport career transition practitioners: development and evaluation

Research question: This paper is an integration of three studies. Study 1 investigates sport career transition organisational intervention programmes for high-performance athletes and training and development programmes for sport career transition practitioners in order to find a research gap with regard to sport career transition supporting services. A psycho-educational curriculum was developed for sport career transition practitioner in Study 2 to fill the research gap. In Study 3, the curriculum was examined to see if the curriculum contributed to enhancing practitioners’ confidence in key competences.

Research methods: A range of methods were applied to the studies including One Group Pre- and Post-test design, Case Study, Focus Group, Semi-Structured Interview, two-round Delphi-Method, and Questionnaires. The data for Study 1 collected from 19 countries worldwide and total 16 participants based in seven different countries were invited to development and evaluation of the curriculum.

Results and Findings: A novel psycho-educational curriculum for sport career transition practitioner was developed and evaluated concerning four competences as a form of curriculum package. The findings revealed that the curriculum package increased the participants’ confidence in key competences concerning sport career transition.

Implications: The findings deepen the knowledge of sport career transition in the areas of organisational intervention programmes focusing on high-performance athletes and sport career transition practitioners. These findings contribute to modifying the Conceptual Model of Adaptation to Career Transition [Lavallee, D., Park, S., & Taylor, J. (2014). Career transition among athletes: Is there life after sports? In J. Williams & V. Krane (Eds.), Applied sport psychology: Personal growth to peak performance (pp. 490–509). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill] by strengthening the organisational intervention perspective and applied work in respect of sporting organisation management strategies.