Serious Leisure Perspectives in Sports: Professional Athletes’ Career Progress via Serious Leisure

The aim of this study is to determine serious leisure perspectives of professional athletes. 689 athletes selected through random sampling participated in the study. The data were collected with the “Serious Leisure Inventory and Measure (Short Form) (SLIM)’’, developed by Gould et al. (2011) adapted to Turkish by Ozdemir, Ayyildiz Durhan, and Akgul (2020) which consisting of 12 items and 3 sub-dimensions. It was determined that the data were not distributed homogeneously and non parametric tests were applied. In the analysis of the data, descriptive statistics, Man Whitney U, Kruskall Wallis, Tukey (HSD-LSD) and Pearson Correlation test were used for within-group comparisons. In this study, total internal reliability coefficient of SLIM (short form) scale was determined as .93. Participants had higher SLIM scores (89,60 ± 15,76), the highest subscale score was ‘’identification with pursuit and social outcomes’’ sub-dimension (37,39 ± 7,35), and the lowest subscale score was ‘’individual outcomes’’ (22,30 ± 4,39). Significant relationships and differences were found among the variables of gender, sports, age of athletics, number of trainings per week, participation status of international competitions, perceived challenge of duties, perceived skill development and perceived total development. As a result of the research, it was determined that professional athletes had high serious leisure perspectives and this situation being in interaction with certain variables.