Salient athletic identity, resulting from athletic role engulfment (Adler & Adler, 1991; Goldberg & Chandler, 1995), causes athletes to experience difficulties such as mental health and suicide ideation (Beamon & Bell, 2011). Previous research has included general examinations of college athletes’ athletic identity (Houle, Brewer, & Kluck, 2010; Murphy, Petitpas, & Brewer, 1996), but notably there is a lack of research regarding high school athletes’ athletic identity development as it pertains to their holistic well-being._x000D_
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Recently, there have been calls for the use of narrative inquiry to explore social phenomena within sport spaces (McGannon & Smith, 2015; Smith, 2010). Therefore, utilizing a narrative inquiry approach, scholars examined lived experiences of black high school football players currently enrolled in high school located in Washington, D.C. Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with players, while serving as an participant observer to (a) explore how athletic identity, roles, and responsibilities were symbolically interpreted within and through social institutions, personal interactions, and the historical context of such lived experiences (Ezzy, 1998), and (b) discern ways in which a salient athletic identity, along with pre-collegiate hyper-devotion to athletic roles and responsibilities, are products of unhealthy social support and identity foreclosure within the high school setting._x000D_
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Presenters will provide a theoretical depiction of narrative inquiry to display the nuances of socially constructed identities within the sport context, along with study results, conclusions, and practical and theoretical implications for the sociology of sport landscape.