Abstract

The challenge of this ethnographic study was to show the level of cooperation built up in an under-14 male basketball team during one competitive season. The article starts by describing sports psychology studies on cooperation, and then goes on to study it from a constructivist paradigm as a communication process which is constructed through team members’ interaction. In order to fully analyze this communication process we began with the profile of a coach who wants to promote cooperation and to that end uses cooperative learning techniques to encourage their players to actively participate in the discussions that take place before, during and after the games. With the data collected by recording these discussions we categorized players’ interactions and the results show that over the course of the season the responsibility and the assessment of the team increase and reduce negative social skills. The study tackles a second challenge which is to show the communicative process that took place in the team and for this reason we chose to represent the data through writing narratives. Cooperation is a dynamic, developmental, contextual and complex process and representing the results in a narrative format makes it possible to display the construction process.