“Just keep swimming”: a Masters sport story of collective sense of community

Sense of Community (SOC) has been understood in research through individual perceptions. Thus, collective social-relational processes that sustain a serious leisure community remain underexamined. Addressing the need for group-level inquiry and for exploration of SOC in adult sport, this study examined how SOC is collectively experienced within a Canadian Masters swim club. Guided by hermeneutic phenomenology, data were generated over eleven weeks through focus groups with 11 swimmers aged 56–81 (nFG1 = 3, nFG2 = 4, nFG3 = 4), participant-written reflections, and field observations. Through cyclical interpretive writing, data analysis fuzed swimmers’ horizons (inductive themes) with investigators’ horizon (deductive elements) to co-construct an interpretive story of community experiences. Presented as six reflexive journal entries: Just Keep Swimming; The Coaches Get Us; We Can Work It Out; Accountability and Reciprocal Benefits; Rituals, Routines, Norms; and Supportive Bonds. Findings illustrate how collective SOC is cultivated through reciprocal influence and peer leadership, which buffer against late adulthood vulnerabilities and extend psychosocial support into daily life. Swimmers sustain their community using non-competitive inspiration and harmonizing within shared social spaces. This study presents social-relational processes contributing to Masters swimmers’ collective SOC, offering a comprehensive lens for understanding interdependent adult sport communities.