What about the family? Onboarding athletes’ entourage into professional sport organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Effective onboarding practices benefit both the incoming members and the organization as a whole. However, to date, existing onboarding literature has focused exclusively on the incoming members, with little attention to those in their social network, such as family members (e.g., partners, parents/guardians). The purpose of this study was to explore onboarding practices within a professional sport context (i.e., National Basketball Association), with a specific emphasis on understanding the experiences of family members involved in the transition process with an athlete. A qualitative approach was undertaken, involving semi-structured interviews with people who facilitated or had undergone onboarding: organizational representatives (n = 11), athletes (n = 5), and family members (n = 6). Findings demonstrated the importance of resource and information sharing, valuing family members, and developing social capital for successful onboarding, and identified several considerations (e.g., timing, acquisition type) and barriers (e.g., member turnover, status hierarchy). Ultimately, although organizations acknowledged the importance of purposefully onboarding family members, none prioritized the task or had a systematic process in place. These findings reinforce the importance of considering significant others when onboarding professional athletes and provide suggestions for future research directions and practical advancements within the elite sport context.Lay summary: Family members, such as partners and parents/guardians, play an important role in assisting professional athletes through career transitions. While family members experience similar stressors during transition periods, they are often not considered in the onboarding process. Results highlight that family members require purposeful onboarding from sporting organizations to be successfully integrated into a new environment.IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICEThe current findings emphasize the importance of being purposeful and prioritizing family members during the onboarding process of professional athletes.For successful onboarding to occur, organizations should know who will be onboarded and subsequently, provide tailored resources to ensure they feel informed and valued.It is integral that systematic and formal mentoring efforts (e.g., forming a mentoring network) are put in place to foster a sense of connection amongst family members within an organization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".