“All I have to do is pass”: A discursive analysis of student athletes' talk about prioritising sport to the detriment of education to overcome stressors encountered in combining elite sport and tertiary education

•Student-athletes reported that they prioritised sport over their education.•Student-athletes reported sacrificing educational success for sporting success.•Athletes presented themselves as passive regarding prioritising decisions.•Time was a barrier to successfully combining sport and education.•Time was constructed as either fixed or flexible to achieve rhetorical ends.

ObjectivesIncreasingly, athletes are expected to undertake tertiary education contemporaneously with their sporting careers. However, to do so may prove difficult and stressful. Exploration of the stressors encountered by student-athletes in combining the two pursuits is limited. There is also limited research examining whether combining the two pursuits impacts upon sporting or educational success.Design and methodA discursive psychological approach was employed, examining twenty interviews conducted with Australian athletes enrolled in tertiary education, exploring how athletes integrated sport and education.ResultsWithin the interviews, athletes constructed their primary academic goal as to ‘just pass’. Athletes repeatedly presented themselves as sacrificing educational success to integrate the two pursuits. Moreover, athletes constructed accounts of themselves as prioritising sport, but as passive in decision-making around priorities. In doing so, athletes produced accounts that removed their own agency for their sacrificed academic success. The interviewees also constructed time as a barrier to the successful integration of sport and education. In the dataset time was constructed either as fixed, limited and externally controlled, or as flexible and controllable.ConclusionsThese alternate constructions allowed athletes to remove agency for poor educational outcomes, or conversely, enabled them to present themselves as successfully able to integrate sport and education. Thus, differing constructions of time were used to achieve different rhetorical ends. Implications and interventions for supporting student athletes successfully to combine sport and education are discussed.