Free-play street soccer environments: examining youth sport injury risk through a biopsychosocial lens

ABSTRACT This review of literature articulates how the ‘free-play’ street soccer environment creates the context for athletes to thrive in sport, while simultaneously minimizing the injury risks associated with such activity. Williams’ and Andersen's well-known model of stress and athletic injury outlines how athletes’ cognitive and physiological responses to potentially stressful athletic situations can influence sport injuries. This ‘stress response’ is influenced by the personality, history with stressors, and coping resources that athletes bring to the environment. Wiese-Bjornstal furthered theory in this domain by developing the biopsychosocial sport injury risk profile. Her framework identifies potential antecedents to injury that emerge across four categories, each of which holds various levels of risk exposure, risk behavior, and vulnerability to injury: biological, physical, psychological, and sociological. These models provided the framework for this narrative. Specifically, given its psychosocial nature, the free-play street soccer environment may act as a protective sport activity design insofar as it mitigates against known injury risk antecedents. Hence, the inherent risk mitigation of free-play, taken together with the potential it has to create psychological, physiological, and technical development among young people, support greater emphasis on street soccer as a powerful construct for youth development in the game of soccer.