Distancing oneself from a poor season: Divestment of athletic identity

Athletes can experience loss in the form of chronic competitive failure, deselection, injury, and sport career termination. Reactions to these losses may affect and be affected by athletes' self-identity. Although the self has generally been conceptualized as stable in sport-related research, there are compelling theoretical and empirical reasons to expect that aspects of the self may vary across sport situations. In this investigation, two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that sport participants would reduce their self-identification with the athlete role in response to the personal loss resulting from a poor competitive season. Mat intercollegiate athletes completed preseason and late season assessments of athletic identity in both Study 1 and Study 2. As predicted, participants who were not satisfied with their performances during the season tended to decrease their athletic identity to a greater extent than participants who were satisfied with their performances during the season. Taken together, the findings of Studies 1 and 2 provide converging evidence in support of the malleability of sport-specific self-identity in responses to loss.