Dealing with protective and risk factors in the athletic career transitions: a reflection on recent trends of psychological research and practice

An athletic career is unique: it starts in early age, it condenses few years of the life and ends in early adulthood, or may stop suddenly for physical reasons; thus, the athlete must re-think himself into social contexts completely new for him. Recently, next to the normative transitions, new kinds of non-normative transitions were introduced in the athletic career, such as cultural adaptation (moving to a foreign country), entrance into high level centers of training or premature professionalization (Stambulova, 2016), which leads to a decrease in the time available for pursuing an educational path. Moreover, environmental factors have been recognized of great importance in supporting or hindering the transition process (Henriksen, 2010). We’ll examine career transitions of athletes together with the issue of dual career, since this last often occurs contingently with the youth-to-senior transition, and could lead to a subsequent difficulty in the transitions to the work context. The challenge for sport psychologists that work with elite athletes is to sustain them in the transition process to develop the whole person, both in sport and non-sport contexts (Taylor, Ogilvie & Lavallee, 2006). So, we propose that experts contribute to understand what could be protective or risk factors in the main transitions faced by athletes, in sport and in the educational context. The first contribution presents a literature review of qualitative research on career transitions; the second one is a qualitative research involving Italian athletes from different sports about the elements that can favorite or obstacle dual career and career transitions. The third presentation shows a comparison between male and female studentathletes’ opinion on the main skills necessary to deal with dual career in Slovenia; and finally, the last contribution presents the implications of an experience of a psychological service with young athletes in transition.