Digital disconnection in adolescent sport: A reflexive thematic analysis of athletes’ experiences

In a context of pervasive smartphone use and “always-on” connectivity, digital disconnection has emerged as a key area of research concerned with moments of distancing from technology; however, existing evidence has focused primarily on leisure and everyday contexts, paying limited attention to performance-oriented settings such as sport. This study addresses this gap by examining digital disconnection among adolescent athletes, for whom digital technologies occupy a central place in everyday life, from an interpretive–constructionist perspective. We conducted five focus groups with 20 federated adolescent athletes from individual and team sports (14–19 years). Data were analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis through an iterative process. Three themes captured how adolescent athletes experience and explain smartphone disconnection in their sporting context: (1) When the smartphone ceases to be a relevant option in sporting practice: physical separation from the device and the practical incompatibilities during training and competition reduce opportunities for use, displacing the smartphone from adolescents’ practical horizon of action during sporting activity; (2) When smartphone use ceases to be socially appropriate in sporting practice: explicit and implicit social norms, grounded in shared expectations, regulate the legitimacy of smartphone use by delimiting appropriate and inappropriate moments and spaces during training and competition; and (3) When the smartphone ceases to be central due to involvement in sporting practice: attentional and experiential immersion in sport displaces the smartphone from the focus of experience, so that digital disconnection emerges without being deliberately pursued, despite brief and situational reappearances during practice. Overall, digital disconnection among adolescent athletes did not emerge primarily from deliberate individual decisions, but from the alignment of material conditions, social regulation, and embodied involvement in sporting practice, which collectively displaced the smartphone from the centre of experience during training and competition. • Sporting practice fosters unintentional forms of digital disconnection • Physical separation and bodily engagement limit smartphone use in sport • Sport creates socially legitimised spaces for temporary digital disconnection • The sporting context displaces the smartphone from adolescents’ core experience • Momentary connectivity nuances digital disconnection in sport as a non-absolute process