Leisure Tennis as a Socially Embedded Sport Practice: Meaning-Making and Professional Self-Understanding Among Managers

Abstract

This article examines how leisure tennis becomes meaningful as an adult leisure practice situated within social relations and club life, and how Hungarian managers relate experiences of play to their professional roles. It addresses a question at the intersection of leisure studies and managerial identity research: how experiences from a specific sport become relevant to the way managers understand themselves in their professional roles. Using an interpretive qualitative design, the study draws on semi-structured interviews with eight Budapest-based managers who regularly played leisure tennis. A Censydiam-informed projective elicitation task provided supplementary material on associations with tennis, managerial roles, and self-description. Thematic analysis showed that participants narrated tennis through enjoyment, challenge, emotional balance, social connection, and sustained engagement. Participants drew on experiences of individual responsibility, persistence, concentration, patience, self-regulation, tactical adjustment, and social conduct when reflecting on managerial work. The projective material added a symbolic layer, suggesting that explicit meanings of enjoyment, challenge, and recovery may coexist with less directly articulated associations of vitality, power, recognition, and social presence. The article contributes to sport and leisure studies by developing retrospective interpretive alignment as an empirically grounded concept for analysing how sport-specific experiences are selectively related to valued professional meanings.