Purpose
The aim of this project is to examine paradoxes in the development of elite sport for young athletes within the Norwegian sport model. The model is built on egalitarian values such as "sport for all," but it is at the same time under pressure from four developments: tensions between grassroots and elite sport, professionalization, commercialization, and individualization. The project places young athletes in their teenage years at the center and examines how they experience and navigate this landscape. To understand the context in which they develop, the project also looks at what the model is intended to be, as NIF articulates it in its governing documents, and how it is understood, justified, and operationalized by the coaches who surround young athletes in everyday practice. Youth sport appears to be a relatively unregulated phase, without a dedicated model of the kind that exists for children's and elite sport. At the same time, athletes' own perspectives on how they experience sport from the inside, seem to have received limited attention in research.
Project Description
The project is carried out as an article-based dissertation with three studies that together follow the Norwegian sport model from policy to practice. At the centre are young athletes, and how they experience and navigate their development towards the top: what they perceive as decisive for success, how they define success, and which actors they themselves see as most influential. To understand the context in which they develop, the project also examines the model itself. Through analyses of NIF's governing documents, the project looks at what the model is intended to be, and through interviews with the coaches who hold primary responsibility in clubs, at how it is understood, justified and operationalized in everyday practice. The data material draws on document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and observation.
