Cartwheels on ice : a phenomenological exploration of children's skating enjoyment

This paper discusses a project aimed at exploring the processes by which 8-to 10-year-old competitive figure skaters conceive and construct the notion of enjoyment in the contemporary world of sport. Eschewing the existing line of research that imposes the adult model of enjoyment on young athletes, I attempted to capture the richness and diversity of young co-participants' experiences within a skating context/subculture as well as to understand the multiple ways in which they make sense of such experiences. For this project, eight female and male competitive figure skaters from three different ice skating clubs in the southeastern United States were engaged in a phenomenological dialogue in which they were given the freedom to take me to the terra incognita to unravel various meanings of enjoyment in their own words. The interview transcripts were then inductively analyzed, allowing meaningful clusters and themes to emerge from the quotes. The final thematic structure suggests that these athletes ultimately enjoyed their time in figure skating when they were doing something for the First Time, Getting better, Being Creative, Experiencing the Body, and in the context of Other People. Stemming from the hermeneutic emphasis of a constant movement between parts and whole of the phenomenon (Palmer, 1969), the results of this study are presented in a similar manner. A narrative told by Sasha, a composite figure that represents all the coparticipants in this study, gives a sense of the whole of the phenomenon of skating enjoyment; an exhaustive description of the themes that emerged gives a sense of its parts. Consistent with Merleau-Ponty's (1945/1962) notion of the body as a fundamental category of human existence, these young figure skaters exhibited a keen awareness of the body that served as a focal point of their skating experience.