AGING AND SPORTS: A STUDY ON VETERANS BASKETBALL PLAYERS OF RIO GRANDE/RS

Abstract

This study aims to understand the meanings that men who find themselves in old age attributed to the practice of basketball in Rio Grande / RS, a practice that is part of sports history of this city. For this we seek a group of veterans who practiced this sport, and chose the AVB-RG (Basketball Association of Veterans of the Rio Grande). We opted for a qualitative research with ethnographic aspirations. We realized nineteen trips conducted and four interviews over a semi-structured. The researched group consists of about twenty five members, two of whom are called technical directors. When trying to understand why men who are in the old part of a group, other issues emerged, such as the adaptation of the game aiming at an opportunity to participate in the match of all, the relationship with the participants of the veterans who have aged 15 and 35 years, beyond the issue of lack of female participation in the games. We can tell by analyzing the results obtained in the observations and the interviews that sporting activity, where the basketball was what united these veterans, however, different meanings have been assigned to this practice, for example, the feeling of belonging, “homosociabilidade” male and the social relations established in the group that runs through the sport.