“There's No ‘I’ in Team”: Identity work in hockey post-game interviews

Abstract

The present study contributes to work on sports discourse by undertaking an interactional analysis of talk in hockey post-game interviews. Drawing upon studies of interview contexts including broadcast news interviews and sports post-game interviews, I examine hockey journalists' questions and players' responses, where issues of ‘blame’ and ‘praise’ quickly reveal themselves to be of primary consequence to these participants. I draw attention to concrete aspects of turn design that the interlocutors make use of in constructing their questions and answers; through these question-answer sequences, which are quantified as part of the analysis, the participants collaboratively construct and reinforce the hockey community of practice and foster an essential positive relationship between the individual and his team, which I gloss as “teamness”.