FEPSAC Webinar: Supporting Athletes in their Pursuit of Dual Career Excellence (Prof. Natalia Stambulova)

SUPPORTING ATHLETES IN THEIR PURSUIT OF DUAL CAREER EXCELLENCE

FRIDAY 11TH OCTOBER

12:30 CET

Since publication of European dual career (DC) guidelines (2012), athletes’ DC topic has been flourishing in Europe. This is visible in growing amount and quality of publications, several European DC projects and review papers demonstrating that within the European DC discourse research, practice, and policy inform and support each other. Major body of DC knowledge is summarized in recent FEPSAC Position Statement on athletes’ DCs in the European context (Stambulova et al., 2024). This paper also promotes understanding of athletes’ DC path as their striving for DC excellence defined as “sustaining a healthy, successful and long-lasting career in sport in combination with education and/or work” (p. 5). In the DC journey, excellence is not seen as a destination to reach, but a process of striving for, in which DC athletes might need psychological support.

In this webinar, I will depart from conceptualization of a scientist practitioner with related roles and provide a brief overview of DC research useful to consider in applied work with DC athletes. Then I will focus on specific features of supporting student-athletes depending on their situatedness in the DC path (e.g., DC transitions, scenarios) and share my knowledge about resources the practitioners can use (e.g., frameworks, exercises, informative websites). In particular, I would like to discuss applied potentials of two recent frameworks: the dual career assistance model and transition environment conceptualization and two related models.

NATALIA STAMBULOVA

Dr. Natalia B. Stambulova is Emerita Professor in Sport & Exercise Psychology in School of Health and Welfare at Halmstad University, Sweden. Her professional experiences in sport psychology refer to her work for over four decades as a teacher, researcher, and practitioner in the USSR/Russia and since 2001 in Sweden. Her research and about two hundred publications relate mainly to the athlete career / talent development topic with an emphasis on athletes’ dual careers (in sport and education), various career transitions, developmental crises, and factors involved, including athletes’ environments and contexts. Her specialization in applied work is assisting athletes and coaches to deal with various career / lifestyle issues, and especially with various career transitions including athletic retirement.

Dr. Stambulova is serving as an associate editor in Psychology of Sport and Exercise and International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology and the guest editor in Journal of Sport Psychology in Action. She is a former member of the FEPSAC Managing Council (1995-1999) and a former (2009-2017) VicePresident of the International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP). She is a fellow of the Association of Applied Sport Psychology (AASP,2015) and the International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP,2018) as well as an honorary member of FEPSAC(2024). Her major international awards are: Distinguished International Scholar Award of the AASP (2004), Ema Geron Award of FEPSAC (2019) and the ISSP Distinguished International Scholar Award (2021) “in recognition of making outstanding and distinguished, long term, original contribution to the advancement of sport psychology”.