‘Zero Gravity’: Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Professional Intentions and Career Pathway Vision of Sport Management Students

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, I have to say that this is an interesting paper which could contribute to the sport management education. A number of minor changes are needed, but this paper deserves to be published to give teachers in the field the opportunity to read it.

The literature review is very interesting and up to date. My only concern is that the introduction does not introduce any elements to justify the theoretical anchoring (e.g. self-concept) although there are many references on Covid.

I think it is important to add in the introduction that the Covid situation has led to winners (windfall effect for certain sports associations thanks to government support policies, Dufau et al., 2022) and losers (e.g. esport). This could have an impact on students' expectations.

Dufau, B., Terrien, M., Carin, Y., & Andreff, W. (2022). French amateur football clubs’ finance and revenue volatility: The determinants of demand shocks. Applied Economics Letters, 1-5.

I would also suggest renaming the "conclusion" section to "Discussion and conclusion". There are a lot of references and I think this new name would be more appropriate.

Finally, make sure that the bibliography complies with the instructions to authors (e.g. use numbers rather than authors' names in the text).

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your encouraging words and feedback.

We did our best to include the most recent literature sources and represent up-to-date theoretical background, thank you very much for your attention to detail. However, we can say that theoretical constructs "Self-Concept" and "P-E Perspective" were well-established in the 1980s and widely explained in the research we refer to. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of measuring the COVID-19 pandemic impact is still quite new and should be disclosed in greater detail from a theoretical point of view. That's why we focused on the impact of a pandemic from different angles. 

We appreciate your literature suggestion and valuable insight, we have incorporated it into the intro, how it was recommended.

Thank you for the suggestion to merge the discussion and conclusion, but we are afraid that it can negatively impact the reader's navigation since the manuscript is quite long and must be divided into sections. Moreover, the results and discussion are already merged (explained in the manuscript).

Well noted, we are working on adjusting references to the journal requirements.

Thank you very much again for your time, attention, and valuable pieces of advice.

Reviewer 2 Report

Although the topic of COVID-19 seems frequent, a model study was realized due to the qualitative approach and the classical methodology. The research is based on fresh and modern literature references integrated into the research process. The theoretical background is presented in sufficient detail, and the processing of the interviews is thorough. At the same time, a more detailed presentation of the sample's parameters (age, gender, international aspects) can be suggested. When presenting the results, Chapter 4 is somewhat fragmented; the number of subsections is relatively high, so it should be considered to merge them. The Conclusion is of particularly high quality, in which constructive proposals are formulated. Moreover, the suggestions for further research are also noteworthy.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We highly appreciate your kind words and positive feedback.

Thank you for your comments, we have added age details to the data collection sample. There are some international aspects shown in lines 224-229.

Thank you for the suggestion to merge sections. The results and discussion are already merged, since for the qualitative study results are more valuable with an immediate interpretation. In this regard, we have decided to provide an articulated structure to help a reader to navigate a quite big piece of complex information.

We believe that the topic of this study s important for management education, and it provides theoretical and practical implications and up-to-date theoretical background. Thank you for the constructive comments and encouraging review.