5 | 151 Career, family, and sport participation: a simultaneous exhibition? many participants had creative solutions for (re)starting or sustaining sport participation in their new life situations, dealing with the shifted resource balance and associated opportunities and constraints for and perceived benefits of sport participation after becoming a student, professional partner and parent. These solutions are characterised by less structured and/or less frequent sport participation in more flexible, informal and/or individual settings, and sport activities that can easily be combined with or linked to the new event-related activities and responsibilities. We will describe these ways to (re)start or sustain sport participation during the transition to adulthood in more detail. Most commonly, participants who practised sport in a “heavy” setting (mainly as a sport club member, often within a team) dropped out during their transition to adulthood. They perceived it as too time-consuming, time-bound and socially demanding, and therefore too difficult to combine with the new life situations after the occurrence of major life events. In the words of a couple of participants: “I stopped playing volleyball when I started studying. Although I loved it, practising at a club required me to practise and play a match weekly. I noticed that was too much in combination with my degree and the time it took to study for that.” (Koos) “When you are young you are actually quite free. Then it is easier to choose for a team sport. And when you get a bit older and you start cohabiting and get children, then uh, you have to deal with the fact that you are not always able to go, because you are too busy at work or too busy with your children in the evening. And because you are dealing with several parties so to speak, with your partner and your children, you rather choose something to do individually like fitness, Zumba or other sports which enable you to switch during the week, instead of practising a team sport which is tied to a specific day. Plus, if you cancel, you more or less abandon your team. So, I thought the easiest way to continue sport participation is to do something individually instead.” (Hetty) The latter narrative fragment also illustrates that participants switched to or started sport activities in a “lighter” setting. These “light” settings provide more individualised and informal ways of practising sport and are less constrained
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