Wachstum als Herausforderung. Soziologische Analysen des Wachstumsmanagements jugendlicher Spitzenathleten und Nachwuchstrainer

Abstract: Youth elite athletes undergo a critical phase of development. During adolescence, they must negotiate physical, psychological and social changes while delivering top-level athletic performances. Within this context, the growth process acquires a central relevance. Besides changing physical performance parameters, susceptibility to injury increases; for coaches, the athletes’ growth process constitutes a challenge. Until now, the problems that arise from this situation have only been researched from a biomedical perspective. The aim of this article-based dissertation is to address this gap in research and to examine the relevance of the growth process in youth elite sport from a sociological perspective. In order to frame growth and growth problems as sociocultural phenomena, socialization, sociology of the body, and knowledge sociological theories are utilized. For the data collection, a qualitative study in German Olympic youth elite sport was conducted (Article 1). The analyses draw on 24 biographical interviews with 14- to 18-year-old male (12) and female (12) athletes from the disciplines biathlon, handball, artistic gymnastics, and wrestling, as well as 16 expert interviews with national, regional and training centre coaches. Within the empirical articles, the sociocultural causes of the growth problems (Article 2), and the coaches’ role therein, are addressed (Article 5). Additionally, the athletes’ coping strategies are examined (Article 3), as are the health and organizational consequences of the growth problems (Article 4). The analyses show that elite sport, as a socialization context, is significantly involved as a cause of the growth problems. The mismatch between the individual physical development and the relatively rigid social norms of elite sport (regarding e.g. performance, age or weight) generate systematic problems. Furthermore, elite youth athletes, due to their socialization in elite sport, also “incorporate” patterns of thought and behaviour that lead to a risky relationship with their growing bodies. The coping strategies that the youth athletes develop often aggravate the existing problems. In the coaches’ handling of training load limits, a significant risk of inappropriate loading can be observed: in order to determine the training capacity of a youth athlete, coaches develop concepts that lead to highly variable training load limits, depending on the coaches’ knowledge and subjective concerns. Altogether, the results show that growth problems carry with them long term health consequences for youth athletes and also compromise the sustainable development of the elite sport system.