ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to challenge the dominant ways of thinking about sport life and explores some alternative metaphors which provide sport psychologists with the resources to study the subjective meanings in the sport life project. There are numerous other ways of metaphorically speaking about athletic careers, each containing implicit ideas about the meaning of sport life, 'good' and 'bad' directions in that journey, and what constitutes success and failure. The idea of a career and its associated metaphors such as career ladders and pyramids are profoundly individualistic and prescribe moving 'upwards' as the desired goal. If an athletic career is visualised as conquering a mountain, the normative goal is then to continue ascending when other routes seem to lead astray. The career models, coupled with the practical aim to support athletes in their progression and minimising 'loss of talent', guide research efforts to identify individual and environmental barriers and facilitators of successful transitions in the career ladder.
