The Sport Ethic, as defined by Hughes and Coakley, is what many participants in sport have come to use as the criteria for defining what it means to be a real athlete. They include:
-Being an athlete involves making sacrifices for The Game
-Being an athlete involves striving for distinction
-Being an athlete involve accepting risks and playing through pain
-Being an athlete involves refusing to accept limits in the pursuit of possibilities
Athletes conform to this set of beliefs because if they have the willingness to conform to these ideas then they will have more support and help athletes overcome and deal with risks, pain, and fears. Some athletes are also seen as "over-conforming" to their sport. This is due to various influences around the stigma of their sport. This makes athletes believe that if they conform, they will succeed as an athlete. For example, a lot of sports require athletes to be relatively thin because it makes them faster or better. This causes some to take it to the extreme and become anorexic. This over-conformity causes athletes to surpass the line of conformity and turns into insanity. As Hughes and Coakley state in the reading, "many athletes do not see their ove-rconformity to their sport ethic as deviant; they see it as confirming and reconfirming their identity as athletes and as member of select sport group" (Hughes, Coakley 1991). These are purely social because in order to seem like a more competitive athlete, one must conform to what is deemed as appropriate to succeed.
I have experienced all of the four dimensions of the sport ethic. I was a competitive swimmer for over ten years and my entire life revolved around the sport. The sacrifices I made were that I did not get to hang out with my friends on the weekends, because I was either training or at a meet and I attended over 9 practices a week in high school. The risks associated with the sport of swimming are, of course, injury. I have had several injuries in my shoulder from swimming and they still are not back to normal and still hurt to this day. Even though I knew that I was injured, I continued to keep swimming every day and training. Swimming is all about playing through the pain because when you race you are in pain the entire time and it is how you deal with it mentally that will determine how successful you will be as an athlete.
-Being an athlete involves making sacrifices for The Game
-Being an athlete involves striving for distinction
-Being an athlete involve accepting risks and playing through pain
-Being an athlete involves refusing to accept limits in the pursuit of possibilities
Athletes conform to this set of beliefs because if they have the willingness to conform to these ideas then they will have more support and help athletes overcome and deal with risks, pain, and fears. Some athletes are also seen as "over-conforming" to their sport. This is due to various influences around the stigma of their sport. This makes athletes believe that if they conform, they will succeed as an athlete. For example, a lot of sports require athletes to be relatively thin because it makes them faster or better. This causes some to take it to the extreme and become anorexic. This over-conformity causes athletes to surpass the line of conformity and turns into insanity. As Hughes and Coakley state in the reading, "many athletes do not see their ove-rconformity to their sport ethic as deviant; they see it as confirming and reconfirming their identity as athletes and as member of select sport group" (Hughes, Coakley 1991). These are purely social because in order to seem like a more competitive athlete, one must conform to what is deemed as appropriate to succeed.
I have experienced all of the four dimensions of the sport ethic. I was a competitive swimmer for over ten years and my entire life revolved around the sport. The sacrifices I made were that I did not get to hang out with my friends on the weekends, because I was either training or at a meet and I attended over 9 practices a week in high school. The risks associated with the sport of swimming are, of course, injury. I have had several injuries in my shoulder from swimming and they still are not back to normal and still hurt to this day. Even though I knew that I was injured, I continued to keep swimming every day and training. Swimming is all about playing through the pain because when you race you are in pain the entire time and it is how you deal with it mentally that will determine how successful you will be as an athlete.
It's interesting that the mental game is just as important, or more, than the physical game when it comes to winning in sports. We talk so much about the physical prowess of athletes and compare them to each other but we don't talk as much about the mental capabilities and features of athletes. Sure, we talk about how one player is always calm and collected in a situation, or how another player had the presence of mind to act in some way, but it's never talked about as central to a player's success as their physical regimen.
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