Parker Triano

Sport participation has been shown to be associated with positive psychological benefits. Positive personality-trait-like individual differences are desirable traits such as self-efficacy, self-esteem, positivity, resilience and perseverance (Laborde et al., 2015; Laborde et al., 2016). Researchers have examined the characteristics that, if present, make a youth sport environment facilitative to the development of life skills through sport, and aid the transfer of those life skills into a non-sport context (Bean et al., 2018). Sport can represent a source of agency, learning, and positive youth development, and this research aims to assist in understanding how athletes conceptualize the way their own childhood sport participation influenced their development of positive personality-trait-like individual differences. The proposed research aims to understand what makes a sport experience conducive to the acquisition of positive personality-trait-like individual differences through the lens of former youth sport participants. Interviews will take place with former youth athletes who are now adults to understand how they believe their youth sport experience did or did not facilitate the development of positive personality-trait-like individual differences. Research will be conducted using an inductive phenomenological approach (Creswell & Poth, 2025; Mayan, 2023). Creating an in-depth understanding of what types of interactions and experiences former youth athletes identify as beneficial will allow for an informed approach to the administration of youth sport. The goal of this specific research is to create recommendations, sourced directly from the perspectives of former youth athletes, that will help administrators to maximize the opportunity for positive youth development in sport.