This dissertation attempts to better understand the lives of college football players. The project begins with the assumption that the ways individuals talk about their experiences have a significant impact on others. An organizational framework is used to appreciate the central importance of communication in coordinating organizational relationships and developing impressions.
College football players were gathered from three separate institutions representing different competitive levels of college football. Through interviews, participants were invited to provide stories that reflected their understandings of what it means to play college football. Because the intent of this study was to better understand issues related to the culture of playing football, common themes were derived from those interviews in an attempt to answer four separate research questions. Not surprisingly, athletes commonly discussed the role of injury during college football as injury is a common experience across competitive football teams.
The results of this study are interrelated. First, I discuss how metaphors are used to illustrate the lives of college football players and how these reflect one’s relationship to the team. The metaphors of football as a job and football as a family were shared among participants. Second, by exploring the expectations of what it means to be an athlete, I was able to discuss the importance of gaining trust among teammates and how trust in others can be lost if one does not conform to proper scripts of interaction. These results support the notion of the “generalized other” discussed in the third portion of this study. The stories concerning college football players’ experiences with being injured revealed a dialectical tension between the individual and generalized other. When injured, the athlete experiences a dialectical tension between participation and exclusion and is called upon to manage this tension between himself and the rest of the team.
This study supports how one’s experience in sport is socially constructed through communication with others. Issues of masculinity, group influence, and the role of the athlete are discussed. Furthermore, limitations to this study and directions for future research are also presented.