![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
The present paper explores the trauma and challenges associated with career‐ending sports injury. The story presented here charts the moment of injury, the process of recovery and the challenges of starting a new life away from sport. Multi‐layered reflection is evidenced through an auto‐ethnographic storyline, one that illustrates the link between reflection (and reflection on reflections) and the process of ‘storytelling’. In stylistic terms the first and second authors appear (differentially) as embedded voices within the text. The first author, as auto‐ethnographer and storyteller, is positioned centrally in the main body of the paper. The second author acts as narrator in the introduction and summary sections. The auto‐ethnographic material is formulated from two sources. In a primary sense, the first author’s auto‐ethnographic writing dictates the structure and tone of the story. In addition, the author was encouraged to reflect further on his auto‐ethnographic tale (a process facilitated by the third author). Information from this further phase of reflection and discussion has been assimilated into the auto‐ethnographic storyline. The text is not associated, in any deductive sense, with established theories or constructs. The embedded voices of the first and second authors, and the theory‐free approach to writing, serve to move the story away from the assumptions of the ‘Realist Tale’ in which a qualitative text is typically both theory laden and author evacuated. This approach encourages a sense of accessibility whilst also creating the opportunity for readers from different academic and/or applied backgrounds to identify with the text in their own way.