Introduction and Aim: The professional Dual Career (DC) assistance is emerging across Swedish sports universities stimulated by the Swedish national guidelines for elite athletes’ DCs (Swedish Sports Confederation, 2018). Alongside this development, the research and understanding of athletes’ DCs has increased (Stambulova & Wylleman, 2019), and there is a need to merge the current knowledge in a framework that can guide DC support.

Method: The authors engaged in a series of conceptual discussions to synthesized findings from the PhD studies of Linnér (2021), European DC research (e.g., Brown et al., 2015) and relevant Erasmus+ projects including the Gold in Education and Elite Sport (e.g., De Brandt, 2017) and the Ecology of DC (e.g., Henriksen et al., 2020). A key aspect of such a synthesis was merging the holistic developmental (Wylleman, 2019) and the holistic ecological (Henriksen & Stambulova, 2017) approaches by suggesting a support that integrates a whole person, whole career, and whole environment perspective. The synthesis was summarized in the DC Assistance (DCA) framework to support the development of professional DC support.

Results: The DCA framework is structured as a pyramid embedded in the national DC context and the local DC development environment (Henriksen et al., 2020). The environment and context are dynamic, indicated by a surrounding timeframe. The DCA sets the aim of support provision to be helping student-athletes develop and maintain optimal DC balance (Stambulova et al., 2015) to facilitate their striving for career excellence (Stambulova et al., 2020). That is, supporting a healthy, successful, and long-lasting career in sport and life by helping student-athletes reach their sport and study goals, live satisfying private lives, and maintain health and wellbeing. Maintaining balance is not without challenges, and the framework points the attention to the DC scenarios and transitions capable of compromising balance (e.g., Linnér et al., 2021), and guides DC support providers in helping student-athletes to choose the most efficient coping strategies to meet their challenges and maintain their DC balance, based on their current resources and barriers. These include their DC competences (e.g., Linnér et al., 2019) and available DC support (e.g., Knight et al., 2018), or lack thereof, within a DC development environment (Storm et al., 2021). Depending on the person, situation, and environment, what sometimes is a coping resource, for example, motivation or flexibility, can also be a barrier to deal with. The outcome is expressed as student-athletes’ becoming “winners in the short-and long-run” (Lindahl et al., 2011; Stambulova et al., 2015) meaning being able to manage the challenges of a DC lifestyle and feeling well-prepared for the life after sports.

Discussion and conclusions: The DCA framework stimulates support providers to consider DC assistance in relation to four target areas. These include (a) optimizing student-athletes’ DC awareness and competences, (b) optimizing the everyday DC support based on student-athletes’ needs, (c) optimizing the DC development environments’ structure and philosophy of support, and (d) optimizing student-athletes’ conditions for pursuing a DC.