What makes one stay in sports? Experience, desire, and pedagogy in question

Abstract

This essay proposes a theoretical shift in Sport Pedagogy, choosing experience as the central category of formative processes. Unlike instrumentalist approaches focused on technique, it argues that sports teaching produces meanings, affects, and modes of existence that transcend motor domain. Based on the critical tradition and the philosophy of difference, it distinguishes living through from experience, defining the latter as a mediation process where the subject is affected. Desire is seen as a relational production, while permanence and dropout are analyzed as effects of concrete pedagogical experiences, crossed by power and institutionality. The teacher acts as a mediator and producer of experiences, whose choices impact the bonds with the practice. It concludes that a pedagogy based on experience shifts the focus from performance to the production of meaning, consolidating sport as an ethical and cultural space capable of sustaining lifelong engagement.