AUTHOR=Johansson Fred , Tranaeus Ulrika , Asker Martin , Skillgate Eva , Johansson Fredrik 

TITLE=Athletic Identity and Shoulder Overuse Injury in Competitive Adolescent Tennis Players: The Smash Cohort Study

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sports and Active Living

VOLUME=Volume 4 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sports-and-active-living/articles/10.3389/fspor.2022.940934

DOI=10.3389/fspor.2022.940934

ISSN=2624-9367

ABSTRACT=Objectives: Our primary aim was to determine if athletic identity is prospectively associated to shoulder overuse injuries. Secondly, we aimed to determine if athletic identity is prospectively associated to playing through pain, and to describe how athletic identity relates to sex, age, playing level, weekly training load and match volume. Methods: A cohort of 269 adolescent tennis players were followed over a period of 52 weeks. Cox regression was used to estimate the hazard rate ratio (HRR) of first-time shoulder overuse injury associated with every 10-unit increase on the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (AIMS).  Results: The adjusted HRR of shoulder overuse injury was 0.89 (95% CI: 0.36-2.20) and the odds ratio of playing through pain was 2.41 (95 % CI: 0.74-8.96), for every 10 unit increase on AIMS. Level of athletic identity was higher among players at the national level than among players at the regional level and was weakly correlated to weekly hours of tennis matches, tennis training and fitness training. Conclusions: Our results indicate that higher levels of athletic identity may be associated to a lower incidence of shoulder overuse injuries, and potentially to playing through pain, although these results are inconclusive due to wide confidence intervals.