Abstract

The last decade has witnessed increasing attempts to investigate and understand the concept of transition in the context of sport. Such studies have tended to focus on migratory and career transitions as experienced by individual athletes (e.g. Hickey & Roderick, 2017; Schinke et al., 2013). This paper attempts to address a gap in the literature with a novel approach predicated on two claims: first, that transition encompasses not only the spatiotemporal but also movement through social boundaries, and second, that “humans are essentially storytelling creatures” (McGannon & Smith, 2015: 80). Drawing on interview data collected from a single British university football team over a 3-year period, this work seeks to understand the transitional experiences of new players as they cross the social boundaries of the team, and illuminate how they construct, and make sense of, transitional experiences through stories. Following Ochs & Capps’ (2001) notion of “tellability”, it is argued that player story selection was not arbitrary but specifically selected as a discursive means of making sense of team transitional experiences in the overall context of their entering university. Revealing a team environment humming with laddish masculinity (Dempster, 2009; Francis, 1999), transitional experience was retold as a process of compliance and reward: compliance with laddish ideals of behaviour resulted in the reward of friendship, protection, status and place in the team’s community in the unfamiliar space of university.

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