Basketball, embodiment and the everyday

Drawing on a study involving university basketball players, this chapter examines the challenges, both empirically and methodologically, of identifying, analysing and interpreting sporting embodiment in team-based sports. In so doing, it elaborates on the concept of the everyday whilst identifying points of overlap between sociology of the everyday and a sociology of the body. Messy texts’ and narrative analysis are of particular value here, as they enable the author to highlight the complexities and contradictions of embodied experience without resorting to social or biological reductionism. By deconstructing different and often varied experiences of what basketball means for university basketball players, the author argues that there are dynamic possibilities to explore and examine the contested terrain of everyday embodiment.