With the aim of better understanding and supporting athlete’s experiences of wellbeing, this research project established two key research goals: 1) inquiry: to investigate and understand athlete-specific risk and protective factors, and 2) impact: to support the development of effective wellbeing supports in response to those factors. This research project, investigating a professional Australian rugby league football club, used one-on-one interviews, workshopbased interventions, and surveys, to evaluate athlete’s experiences of the Athlete Wellbeing & Education (AW&E) Framework employed by the Australian Rugby League (ARL). Guided by organisational logic theory, it explores the relationship between structure and agency at the individual, organisational, and institutional levels of analysis, and measures patterns of compatibility and centrality between wellbeing, performance, and commercial logics. The analysis demonstrates the need to embed a more transdisciplinary approach to holistic wellbeing within high performance (HP) systems and recognise the important protective role that HP members have within the athlete’s psychosocial support network. This thesis, informed by the ‘Whole-Club Capacity’ (WCC) Approach to AW&E, presents a philosophy of care that connects the full ecology of elite sporting organisations to the athlete’s experience of wellbeing, and articulates the reciprocal gains that effective wellbeing support systems can have on athletes’ performance, elite sporting organisations’ commercial interests, and on their duty of care/social responsibilities. It presents a number of pragmatic recommendations which could be implemented under the WCC Approach to AW&E, and includes two interventions (mental health literacy training and connection workshops) developed and evaluated within this project’s action research methodology. At its conclusion, this thesis presents a rationale for the need to de-stigmatise help-seeking within HP environments and strengthen athletes’ psychosocial supportive resources, and provides a range of subsequent strategies that elite sporting organisations can use to do so
