**7. Social support and well-being**

### **7.1 Solidarity and support**

Participants credited social support for their ability to establish new forms of identity and purpose in their lives following TBI. Philip described the efforts of his teammates, family, peers, and coaches as beneficial for navigating the abrupt end of his football career. He describes a conversation with his father after Philip was sidelined with a concussion:

*My Dad is like the hardest guy I've ever known, hardest worker. He's so supportive about football and he's played his entire life too. He loves the game and for him to be on the phone with me and to have him start crying and saying, "Alright, this is it, we got to hang it up." That's when I was like, "Alright, this is it." But, yes, I definitely felt supported by my parents throughout this process.*

Philip finds comfort in his father's empathy. He also found support from the team's linebacker coach who explained "if you were my son, I'd tell you to shut it down." Reflecting on his decision to retire from football, Philip explained that everybody around him was supportive:

*And when it came down for me to actually say I was officially done, I sat down with my linebacker's [position-] coach and also the head coach and they were both like "this is the right decision for the long term and obviously we're going to miss you this year but your health is a lot more important".*

Support from coaches at an NCAA division I program, whose professional livelihoods are tied to young players like Philip, is difficult to overstate. With so much professional capital at stake, coaches can easily adopt a utilitarian relationship towards their players, squeezing every drop of performance from their players until there is nothing left. His position coach deliberately chooses to place himself in the position as Philip's mentor and caretaker, placing the personal well-being of his player above the productive value he might have had to the team as a starting linebacker. The whole coaching staff makes it clear that player health and well-being is more important than winning. Philip explains:

*I have so much support from my friends, my family and no one's going to tell me that I did anything wrong in life or I was quitter or anything like that. I may have thought that but I think as I progress through my life, not doing contact sports is probably the better thing.*

Even with the family and coaching support, Philip still loses his typical inseason routines of training, practice, and competition. Though his coaches allow

#### *Social Support, Identity, and Meaning: A Phenomenological Analysis of Post-Concussion… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95541*

him to stay with the team in a quasi-coaching role, there's a noticeable hole left by physical training and performance.

Roger was also surprised by the support he received from university football coaches following his most serious concussion. After ignoring them for weeks for fear of being rejected, he finally told them what had happened. "It was just a big change. They checked in on me. They called to see if I was okay rather than getting on me about stuff I was doing wrong. […] And that meant the world to me."

Roger took a break from school to adjust and began working in an athletic shoes store. This gave him an opportunity to build relationships outside of football while also maintaining continuity—from athletics to athletic equipment. "That was very good for me, being in a social, interactive environment helping people getting something that they need, which is shoes." Despite the lack of glamor, there are a series of factors in Roger's new job that support well-being: strong relationships with his new coworkers, a sense of purpose and identity in his work, and unique knowledge of the field.

### **7.2 Accepting personality change**

Beyond strong relationships, empathy, and social support from peers and loved ones, another significant factor in building a sense of well-being for participants was their ability develop a new post-injury personality. We have seen the changes accepted by Maryann in the classroom. The loss for Roger and Philip was more significant, since the injury forced them into early retirement. Something new and significant had to replace football.

As mentioned, Roger's football career ended abruptly after a series of TBI's during the preseason of his senior year in college. He describes the process of refocusing his identity and relationships:

*(Strong relationships are) what I did not think I was going to have. It was like even though I'm social, it was like okay I work with you, cool. But no, like we actually do things outside of work. We go to movies. We go out to eat and all that stuff. To find friends so fast was great for me. I felt like I would not find friends again. I thought that was going to be harder than what it was. To find another group of friends that I could talk to outside of sports was great. Usually all of my friends were from sports, playing on teams since I was younger. Most of my friends came from like, either, the travel team I played on, the school team I played on. And like, it was cool to have friends from different walks of life. One of the girls, she's gay and in the world we are in now just to have a friend that's gay is cool because the stuff that they go through may be totally different from what you go through. Just seeing a different perspective and talking to her or helping her for how she can handle situations when people are talking bad about her and all that stuff but, to see her, how she handles things is phenomenal. A lot of stuff just rolls right off her shoulder. It's great because if she can do that just because of her sexual preference, I can do that and nothing is really going on it's all up inside my head. So, those relationships at work really helped me just like, find myself again, to know that I was okay. Get back to being the regular me. So, this is about becoming the student I want to be again and that's probably the toughest part because my brain is not where it used to be. So, it takes me a little longer to do papers. And that's what's tough right now.*

Research shows that the shift in identity for athletes, especially after abrupt retirement due to injury, can be distressing and lead to psychosocial tension (Petitpas, et al., 2000). However, this line of research also speaks to the real benefits that retired athletes can receive from engaging in a flexible sense of identity. Roger continues, describing the process of refocusing his identity and relationships:

*I felt like I would not find friends again. I thought that was going to be harder than what it was. To find another group of friends that I could talk to outside of sports was great. Usually all of my friends were from sports, playing on teams since I was younger. Most of my friends came from like, either, the travel team I played on, the school team I played on. And like, it was cool to have friends from different walks of life.*

Finally, Philip admits that nothing in life will match the feeling you get running out onto the football field but hopes to experience it in bits and pieces throughout life. "There's going to be aspects of my life later on where it's going to be those same emotions, those same strong feelings that I'm going to get while I'm playing football." Ultimately, Philip's combination of flexible identity and social solidarity offer a clear sense of career perspective for him, and allows him to be open, adaptable, and hopeful about the inevitable shift in life he faces.
