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While sport psychologists have recently been encouraged to embrace digital technology and social media use in their practice, little is currently known about the associated benefits and challenges of adopting these recommendations. Published studies in other professions have suggested that engaging in social media use can be a double-edged sword, offering great communication benefits, but at the same time having the potential to impact upon work-life balance and general wellbeing. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore practitioner social media use and perceptions, and to explore participant use of the Twitter social media platform.Participants were initially 44 sport psychology practitioners who complete an online questionnaire, of which 28 also consented to their Twitter posts from the previous 30-days being analyzed using a reflexive thematic analysis approach. Analysis produced two main categories: tweets and retweets. The tweets were composed of seven first order themes (media comments, advice and opinion, thoughts on events, self-promotion, knowledge dissemination, recommendations and activity), with the retweets composed of eight first order themes (media programming, events, sports fixtures, promotion, sport-specific content, news stories, opinions, and dissemination). Of particular importance was the perceived link between social media use and mental health, and lack of training and development.

Leadership has been shown to be a fundamental factor influencing the performance of sport teams. Within these teams, leadership can be provided by coaches, formal athlete leaders, such as team captains, and other ‘informal’ athlete leaders. The role of the athlete leader in a team, either formal or informal, has been consistently reported over the last 10 years to have a significant impact upon a teams’ functioning and effectiveness, as well as teammates’ general health and mental wellbeing. As such, cultivating the provision of this leadership within a team has emerged as an important focus for managers, coaches, sport psychologists and scholars alike. While the recognition of the importance of athlete leadership is well established, there has been a lag in the development of systematic approaches to enhance and develop the leadership skills and capabilities of the athletes within sport teams. As a result, this paper seeks to review contemporary examples and current understanding of approaches to athlete leadership development. The paper will also highlight future areas for research and applied practice development.

Much importance has been assigned to the role of the team captain. In this article, we test whether today’s team captains live up to these high expectations. Furthermore, we provide greater insight into the selection procedures leading to a captain’s appointment and assess how this process impacts upon the captain’s perceived leadership qualities. Adopting a mixed methods design, a total of 398 participants (226 players and 172 coaches) listed the attributes of both their current team captain and their ideal captain. Altogether, participants listed 635 attributes for their current team captain and 919 attributes for their ideal team captain. Both inductive and deductive approaches were used to analyze these qualitative data. Furthermore, quantitative data were obtained on the perceived influencers in the captain’s selection process. The results indicated that, although players and coaches expect their team captains to have good motivational and social leadership skills, the selection process is often underpinned by non-leadership factors, such as experience, sport-specific competence, or irrelevant attributes, such as being the daughter of the club president. This discrepancy held for both coaches’ and players’ perspectives, for male and female teams, across sports, and across competition levels. Although coaches were identified as main influencers in the selection process, giving players the deciding vote did not result in captains with better perceived leadership skills. The significant gap between participants’ expectations of the captain and reality highlights the need for implementing a structure of shared leadership. Furthermore, evidence-based leadership development programs are needed to maximize the team’s leadership potential.

The effective leadership of, and within, sports teams has consistently been highlighted to be an important factor impacting upon a range of outcomes including team performance, and team functioning. However, while there has been an increasing focus on athlete leadership and leadership development in recent years there is little research exploring leadership (rather than leader) development in youth sport. As a result, the aim of this study was to explore athlete perceptions of athlete leadership and the development of athlete leadership skills in a professional football youth academy. Participants were 34 professional football club youth academy players, arranged into 9 focus groups (depending upon age). The data were analyzed using thematic analysis, with six first order themes emerging (Leader behaviors, selection criteria, shared leadership, growth and development, changing environmental constraints, and leader development). The results highlight a good level of awareness of leadership amongst the youth footballers, but also major limitations in the degree to which they felt they were developed as leaders.