Resilience in sports through the lens of dynamic network structures

Resilience – the process of returning to the previous level of functioning following a stressor – has received much attention in the domain of sports in the past decade. Because scholars concur that resilience emerges from dynamic interactions between multiple variables, we propose that network analyses with psychological and physiological variables can help the field to make important strides. Specifically, we discuss how networks can account for the dynamic nature of resilience in sports, how we can understand the role of protective and promotive factors from a network perspective, and how networks can function as the level of analysis to study resilience. Combining these insights, future studies may either focus on daily data collections of psychological and physiological variables to construct and analyze networks or develop computer simulations that can model how such networks respond to external perturbations caused by stressors.