This study aimed to explore the children-to-youth sport transition (CYT) from parents' perspectives, exploring how parents perceive and navigate the CYT. In Norway, athletes transition to youth sport at age 13, when the Children's Rights in Sports are replaced by the Youth Sport Recommendations. This brings changes to the goals, priorities, and operations of sport organisations, reshaping the youth sport environment. We interviewed six parents from Norwegian handball and cross-country ski sports and analysed the data using reflexive thematic analysis. We identified three main themes: parents' understanding of the CYT, parents' perceived support for CYT athletes, and parents' own challenges and meaning-making of sport parenting. Parents perceive the CYT as a period of holistic changes in their children's lives, as athletes must cope with increased workloads in sport and at school, higher expectations, and changes in their peer relationships due to their sport commitment. Parents facilitate their children's sport involvement and coping during the CYT by providing practical and emotional support. At the same time, parents themselves experience challenges as their children transition to youth sport, like increased time commitment, learning new regulations, and the emotional strain of seeing their children face adversity. Their children's sports involvement affects family time and limits parents' opportunities for other interests. Still, parents value the time spent in sport with their children and find their sport parenting journey rewarding and meaningful. The findings highlight the importance of providing resources and support to parents, enabling them to efficiently navigate the CYT experiences of their children and themselves. © The Author(s) 2026

In this study we aimed to explore factors associated to Dual Career (DC) satisfaction in Swedish university student-athletes to contribute to the evaluation of the Swedish sports university system. We considered DC satisfaction as a key indicator of the student-athletes’ ability to maintain an optimal DC balance in their striving for DC excellence and searched for the factors facilitating this process. Using a repeated cross-sectional design, we sampled participants during three consecutive educational years (2020-2022) using an online survey. We sampled 561 high-performance university student-athletes (54% female) with a mean age of 23.82 (SD = 3.35). The student-athletes represented all universities and 54 sports federations in the Swedish sports university system. We performed a Chi-squared Autonatic Interaction Detection (CHAID) analysis to test the potential relationships between independent variables (i.e., DC coping, DC competences, DC support, mental health, autonomy, competence and relatedness support, perception of study and sport flexibility, gender, hours worked alongside DC, and years of study at university) and the dependent variable (i.e., DC satisfaction). Our findings showed that the factors related to DC satisfaction were student-athletes’ DC coping (i.e., their ability to cope with interrelated sport, study, and private life challenges), together with receiving relevant DC support and experiencing relatedness. Taken together, this points towards the importance in creating DC development environments (DCDEs) characterised by individualised empowerment support (i.e., complementing student-athletes coping efforts and adding to their DC competences) and strong peer-relationships with relatedness in a community of student-athletes. © 2024 The Author(s).

The objective of this study was to explore career pathways to athletic success in American professional athletes with low socioeconomic background. Ten African American professional male athletes, who met the criteria of playing at least one year in a professional league and spending their formative years in an American underserved community, participated in the study. Interviews inspired by the cultural praxis of athletes’ careers, lasted 68-137 minutes, and the transcripts were thematically analysed. Four career stages (childhood years, middle/high school years, college years, professional years) and three themes (context, challenges, coping) were visible in the career pathways of the participants. During the first stage the athletes’ athletic foundation was developed by participating in inexpensive, easy to access sports in unstructured sporting environments, while simultaneously relying upon the strength of a mother to keep them safe. An increased susceptibility to the dangers of environmental factors (e.g., drugs, gangs) during the middle/high school years made this period of time the most precarious for the athletes, but was also the most crucial for their athletic development. The college years were a time of “catching up,” whereby the athletes entered a whole new environment for which they were physically (e.g., underweight) and psycho-socially (e.g., racial integration) unprepared, but their hard work and the help of peers and coaches propelled them to success (i.e., professional contract). Finally, the results indicate that coping resources the athletes developed dealing with hardship were perceived as key factors enabling them to endure the difficulties of a professional career. The revisited version of this paper concludes with a reflection of our initial contribution and a look towards future research.

Our authors propose a framework of core literacies for Sport Psychology Scientist-Practitioners (SPSPs), advancing a literacy-based approach to professional formation beyond fragmented competency models. We conceptualise literacies as metacognitive and practice-oriented understandings that enable SPSPs to interpret, integrate, and ethically apply knowledge across complex sport and performance environments. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, position stands, and applied expertise, we identify five interrelated domains termed core literacies: developmental, mental health, contextual, instrumental, and mental performance literacy. Each domain is theoretically grounded and mapped onto key sub-literacies that reflect contemporary research, applied practice, and emerging professional demands. Collectively, these literacies support ethical, culturally responsive, and developmentally informed practice; strengthen SPSPs' capacity to navigate organizational systems, relational dynamics, ethical complexity, and technological innovation; and enhance the translation of scientific knowledge into effective interventions for performance, wellbeing, and long-term athlete development. We argue that these literacies function as evolving developmental resources that require continuous education, supervision, reflexivity, and engagement with shifting scientific, cultural, and technological contexts. The proposed framework, with Table 1 as an abbreviated roadmap for practice, offers a coherent foundation for training, accreditation, continuing professional development, and professional self-assessment. © 2026 International Society of Sport Psychology

A substantial number of elite athletes need to work alongside their athletic careers, yet limited research has focused on working-athletes. Instead, dual career (DC) research, including 19 reviews, has focused almost exclusively on student-athletes. To improve the understanding of how to support working-athletes, we aimed to: (a) summarize the research on working-athletes’ DCs, (b) identify key contributions, and (c) provide recommendations for future research. To this end, we employed a critical systematic review of research on working-athletes’ DCs, using the introduction of the term DC as our starting point and the seven postulates outlining the pursuit of DC excellence as our critical lens. Through our review we identified 30 articles, which were appraised, synthesized, and critically analyzed. Our review indicates that research on working-athletes’ DCs is growing, with pioneering authors making important contributions to understanding how to support working-athletes. Still, research gaps and future challenges remain. We have provided recommendations (e.g. terminological coherence) to guide researchers in addressing these gaps and challenges and advance understanding of how to facilitate working-athletes’ pursuit of DC excellence, helping them become winners in both the short and long run. © 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In this commentary we take a scientist practitioner’s perspective to briefly overview major approaches in career transition research and interventions, summarize a quintessence of athletes’ career transition knowledge in the form of transition literacy postulates, and proceed with how transition literacy can become a resource for athletes, coaches, parents, sport psychology and allied professionals seeking to facilitate athletes’ pursuits of career excellence. We suggest considering transition literacy as (a) the basic transition competencies derived from related theories and research and (b) an important part of athletes’ and their supporters’ broad-based expertise, in addition to more commonly considered performance related knowledge and skills. Distilled from major review papers on athletes’ career development and transitions, the transition literacy postulates also termed the “golden rules” of transitions address the roles of transitions in athlete career development, transition processes, phases, pathways and outcomes, as well athletes’ environments and transition support. We conclude with recommendations of how transition literacy can be a useful part in athletes’, parents’ and coaches’ education and thereafter, provide recommendations for the education of sport psychology professionals. © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

In this commentary we introduce athletic retirement literacy (ARL) as a concept and a novel approach for summarizing and structuring athletic retirement competencies to inform sport psychology practice. Meta-reflections from three recent papers about athletes’ mental health, transition literacy, and transition interventions (Schinke et al., 2024; Stambulova et al., 2025; Stambulova & Schinke, 2025) helped to formulate rationale for a specific focus on ARL. Following the promotion of mental health literacy as well as transition literacy among athletes and their supporters in this commentary we (a) define ARL among high-performance athletes as a set of basic competencies helping them and their supporters to understand the transition to a post-sport career from the individual and ecological perspectives, communicate about it, and make informed decisions and planning; (b) propose a schematic illustration of ARL structure with four major clusters of competencies, and (c) promote ARL-informed interventions. We believe that ARL-informed sport psychology practice will lead to reduced mental health concerns, improved general resilience, and a healthy path forward among retired athletes. © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Athlete development is influenced by psychological and socio-demographic characteristics, socio-environmental conditions, and distressful events. Holistic ecological studies focus on the athlete’s environment to explore these interactions. This study aimed to identify (1) profiles of French elite and professional athletes based on transdiagnostic psychological processes, and (2) socio-demographic characteristics, socio-environmental conditions, and distressful events associated with the profiles. A cross-sectional online survey assessed athletes’ socio-demographic characteristics, socio-environmental conditions, distressful events, and transdiagnostic psychological processes. The sample included 198 elite and 253 professional French athletes aged 18–49 (52% female; mean age: 25 ± 6 years). Three profiles of athletes were identified based on a Hierarchical Cluster Analysis. Profile C1 scored highest for adaptive processes excluding autonomous motivation; it contained more males and professional athletes, fewer student-athletes, and fewer athletes exposed to violence than other clusters. Profile C2 scored higher than average on most adaptive processes, especially autonomous motivation; it contained more women, as well as athletes with paid contracts and satisfied with training time. Profile C3 had the highest scores for maladaptive processes; it contained younger elite athletes, and athletes who were unemployed, exposed to violence, or dissatisfied with training time. Both adaptive profiles were associated with protective factors that nourish mental health, and the maladaptive profile was linked to more risk factors malnourishing mental health. © 2025 International Society of Sport Psychology.

The key idea of this review paper is to consider career transition scholarship in sport psychology through a lens of bridging holistic developmental and ecological approaches to demonstrate their intersections and complementarity in advancing the understanding of career transitions in sport. This paper is intended to: (a) outline an evolution of the career transition topic in sport psychology, emphasizing its development over the last 25 years; (b) summarize major current achievements of career transition research in bridging holistic developmental and ecological approaches; (c) address debates in, and formulate future challenges for, transition research and practice. We consider the evolution of the topic by analyzing the contributions of several milestone publications in Psychology of Sport and Exercise that prepared and spurred on the development of the bridges between transition research focusing on individual athletes and on their related environments. We proceed with situating career transition research within athlete career sport psychology discourse and propose a taxonomy of frameworks used in transition scholarship. Narrative synthesis underlined by bridging the two approaches in focus was used to summarize research- and practice-related knowledge on the transitions of athletes, coaches, and parents. In the final parts we invite the readers to debate some conceptual and research-to-practice issues within the topic as well as discuss future challenges in bridging the holistic developmental and ecological approaches in career transition research and practice. © 2025 The Authors