Sports Psychology
The impact sports psychology is having on sport is growing exponentially. We are hearing more and more that sports psychologists have been responsible for some of the success of both individual or team sport athletes. From Dr Steve Peters and the work, he has done with numerous British sports teams, Lee Richardson and the role he has played in Liverpool’s success and just being a voice and person for the players to talk to, Dr Kate Kirby working with Irish Olympians, to Anne Marie Richardson and Caroline Currid who have worked with numerous GAA teams such as Dublin, Tipperary and Limerick to name a few. Athletes are coming out much more emphasising the edge sports psychology has given in their success, an area athletes would have been afraid to publicise in the past in fear of being seen as weak or needing help.
In doing a short Sports Psychology course and completing two 10,000-word assignments around key areas such as personality, motivation, stress, anxiety, arousal, attitude, leadership and goal-setting, it has allowed me getting a greater understanding of sports psychology and their application and importance to sport. I would no way feel that I would be qualified to provide psychology advice, as that takes far more study in the form of a degree. However, in being able to supplement the previous courses completed around Player-Care and Wellbeing, will greatly assist into the future, in the roles I have and relationships I build within sport.
Without discussing each topic and the academic theory or models, I wish to discuss some of the sporting examples around each. The Siya Kolisi story of how he came from a difficult background in South Africa to captaining the national team to a Rugby World Cup illustrates the personality that he grew and developed and mirrors the work of Hollander and the three levels. In terms of Psychological Core, he fought through the struggles building up courage, values, attitudes, and beliefs that he could be the best and play rugby for South Africa, knocking down every barrier put in his way by others. As he developed and matured his Typical Responses, were to learn behaviours on how he could be the best and were followed up with role-related behaviour in being captain of the national team and learning who to lead, how to successfully manage a high-performance culture and how to get the best out of the 30–40 squad players that make up the South African high-performance setup (Williams and Wigmore, 2020). Several individuals at the top of the sport, in high pressured environment’s Formula 1 or Premier League football such as Christian Horner, Toto Wolff, Mo Farah, Kasper Schmeichel all mention how role-modeling has helped them to get to the point they are at in their careers. Be it their parents ‘ how they lived their lives and their sons followed suit, or perhaps previously their father was in the same position playing top-level football in the case of Kasper and his father Peter. Under pressure when push comes to shove, how are these people going to react and make the right decision and ultimately it comes down to personality and how they behave, along with other supplementary factors such as attitude, motivation, and courage. Toto Wolff discusses a prime example, the first day he walked into Mercedes F1 HQ, they didn’t look like a Formula one team, coffee cups left undrunk, last week’s newspapers sitting in reception. This was a team that was trying to get to the pinnacle of its sport and at that point the right culture was non-existent. Toto brought it back to his upbringing, how he was thought to live his life by his family and others and how lessons previously had shaped his personality to be focused and driven toward achieving a goal (Humphrey and Hughes, 2021).
Motivation in sport is seen as undoubtedly a major facet of sporting success. Gladwell (2009) discusses the 10,000-hour rule and believes it takes 10,000 hours to master a particular thing be it Bill Gates and computer coding, or an athlete mastering football, cricket, rowing, GAA, or rugby. This, therefore, requires the athlete to have both a personality and motivation to continually stick at the sport to develop and master it to become the best they can be. However, Williams & Wigmore (2020) counters these points with proven examples that it doesn’t necessarily take someone 10,000 hours at a certain sport to master it. Being involved in many or other sports can greatly contribute to how a particular athlete takes to a different sport and masters it quite quickly based on the hours spent doing other sports. The best example of which is two-time Olympic Gold Medallist in rowing Helen Glover, who had done sports such as hockey, swimming, and athletics growing up, however, had never tried her hand at rowing. When she was put on GB Rowing Teams “Start programme” she was apprehensive as to how it would go, starting a completely new sport with hopes of competing at an Olympics in four years. By the time Glover won silver in the World Championships in November 2010, she estimated she had only been training and practising rowing for 2,000 hours, and by the time she won gold at the London Olympics in 2012, she had rowed in the region of 3,500 hours. This illustrates that not all athletes develop physically and mentally at the same rate and that an athlete’s personality and motivation to succeed greatly assist in not only changing sporting disciplines but also to be the best and compete and win on the biggest stage.
Kerr (2013) discusses topics such as expectations, pressure and purpose, in a high-performance environment being the New Zealand rugby team, to perform at the highest level, the necessity for both intrinsic motivations to empower yourself to be the best and extrinsic motivation in being a role model to empower others and develop all-round team motivation towards achieving both personal and team goals are essential. The New Zealand rugby team have been very successful and are considered the team every other team wants to beat and mirror. Many studies have been carried out on how they function and perform, though when it comes down to it, each individuals personality and their motivation to be the best assists greatly in developing an overall high-performance culture. When you ask the difference between individual and team athlete’s one competes alone the other competes as part of a team is the general response. However, even though an athlete may perform as part of a team, they have played for a number of teams to get to this point, be it club, county, regional, country, representative teams, each time playing with different players, there is a high level of competition and therefore the need to be intrinsically motivated to personally strive to be the best to make said teams is important. The end goal for a team is winning, however, the building blocks to a team winning are many individuals coming together and putting their personal goals together to form one team, one goal mentality (Hodge et al., 2014).
An example of anxiety in sport would be a GAA player getting the last minute free to win the match. In Cricket a batter would feel state anxiety coming to the crease and being against a bowler who has a history of bowling them out. Many athletes experience some level of anxiety before a competition, but for most, the anxious feelings start just before the competition, may continue during the competition, and diminish after the competition is over. One athlete might feel slightly nervous leading up to a tournament, whereas another might feel overcome with anxiety and get nauseous or faint.
Athletes choking or suffering a catastrophic dip in performance at critical moments, while others thrive when it matters most, is a topic of continuous discussion. There have been some famous cases of choking in many sports, Jean Van de Velde, having a torrid ending to his final 1999 British Open round, when he was cruising to victory. Scott Boswell not being able to bowl a proper cricket over in the 2001 Cheltenham and Gloucester trophy. Whereas an over is normally 6 balls, Boswell bowled 14 balls, due to 8 incorrect deliveries.
A more recent example is England’s Euros Final loss, on the world stage England were unable to do enough in a penalty shootout to get across the line. A lot has been spoken of by media and people within the camp how the group were more united in recent times, in comparison to previous tournament squads and was a reason for this squads supposed success. When it came to penalties Marcus Rashford said “My only contribution to the team was to score the penalty and I couldn’t do it, normally I would score them in my sleep” along with the other players who missed Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, a lot of pressure was on their shoulders at a decisive moment in the shootout and they couldn’t come up trumps. In the post-mortem, the leadership of Gareth Southgate and captain Harry Kane has been questioned in the decisions they made in the order of penalty takers and young players taking decisive penalties, though it is those decisions that can make or break sporting success and it comes down to psychology.
Naomi Osaka, was quoted as saying “see it is a little bit hard, I feel like people are staring at me, and not like in a good way. I never used to be on the radar but now I am and it’s uncomfortable” this shows the affect anxiety, stress and arousal can have on athletes. In the case of Osaka, it comes into sharp focus after she refuses to engage in media duties after her recent French Open match due to her mental health. Both the negative and positive repercussions in the aftermath forced her to make the tough decision to pull out of the competition after being in with a chance of winning as the second seed. This asks questions about society and administrators, what are athletes? People who go play sport for everyone else’s entertainment, every athlete has a personal life, has their good and bad days with their mental health, even more so in the current times, where the sport is being played in midst of a pandemic. Society is often guided too much by rules and regulations and shows no leniency for more important things in life, mental health, wellbeing and family.
Retirement from sport is a major cause of stress, anxiety, unknowing, loneliness. The majority of sportspeople when retiring will release a short statement thanking those around them etc. Often, they will use a line such as “I’m very grateful that I could end it on my terms”, effectively that person has decided to finish themselves, they may have thought about it for months or years, they have built a support network, perhaps a new source of income, a means of filling the spare time. The blow is often softened, on making the choice themselves, albeit still affects some athlete’s mental health in the weeks and months after. Though what if you don’t have the opportunity to retire on your terms, injury, bad form or other factors have forced you to do so. It comes as a shock perhaps, you never expected to be out of a job so young, with no immediate support structures in place personally. How is this affecting those athletes? Grainne Murphy the former Olympic swimmer, talked about how injury forced her into retirement and the coping mechanisms she had to put in place, Gary Murphy the former European tour golfer, spoke about a dip in form that made him lose his tour card, the amounts of money he was spending each week to fly to tournaments and try to rescue his fate, although he had to make the tough decision to let it go. The case of Kevin Doyle and how concussion put an end to his footballing career prematurely. Sporting organisations in more recent years have a greater expectation and responsibility to offer support services to those that have retired or been deselected by that organisation. This was not the case in the past and once the sportsperson was gone some organisations didn’t have anything got to do with them (Lawlor, 2020).
The lad’s culture in sport is a major stigma that has negative results on mental health. The inability for males in team environments to feel they can talk to others about their thoughts, feelings and concerns in fear of being made fun of, talked about or ridiculed. This has led many males to bottle up these thoughts and feelings and lead to massive mental health issues including suicide. Robert Enke a former top German goalkeeper was suffering so much with crippling depression that he stepped on the front of a train aged 32, leaving a wife and kids behind. He felt he couldn’t come to speaking his mind, for one reason or another, an international footballer who had the world at his feet (Reng, 2011).
Elite athletes are like any human being, they can feel anxious and it can affect their performance. In the last 30 seconds of tight basketball games, WNBA and NBA players are 5.8 per cent and 3.1 per cent respectively less likely to make a free throw than at other points in the game. The bigger the crowd, the bigger chance of missing also, with a 10 per cent decrease in successful free throws for every extra 6,000 supporters on average. Managing this anxiety comes down to learning how to brush off failure and visualising doing it better (Williams and Wigmore, 2020).
Cathy Freeman discusses how to have a positive attitude and achieve success it is important to make sure you are very clear with your goals, that there is no questioning your commitment or your desire. Freeman when preparing herself for Sydney 2000 Olympics at no point allowed the notion of defeat to even cross her mind. Instead, she reinforced her belief by mentally running through the final over and over again. Her mind was completely at peace and on autopilot by the time she walked out in front of 110,000 fans. Having a positive attitude freeman believes is down to mental rehearsal and visualisation. Once you have planted the seed of belief in your mind you need the courage to go out of your comfort zone and visualise and imagining trying to ace your greatest fear (Brolin, 2017).
Nothing is dropped from the sky. You have to earn it, and to earn it you have to learn it. You have to work on your mental side and you always have to have a positive mental attitude (PMA). Morocco’s Nawal El Moutawakel claims that during her competing days, her coaches always asked her to say she was the best, that she was number one and that she has to win because she must win. It played on her mental side and she found it tough to say out loud at first. Swimmer Missy Franklin who won four gold medals at the 2012 London Olympics spoke about being able to flick a switch. She never needs to be brash to develop inner strength. Being able to flick that switch between really bubbly and happy to then when it comes to race time being serious, focused and concentrated is an important skill to have. She says that there is a big difference between doing something with a positive attitude vs a negative one. If she goes into a meet with a negative attitude, it will be 100 times harder. She doesn’t see the point of creating negative energy and using it for no gain. She wants to grow as a person and be a better version of herself each year (Brolin, 2017).
These are only some of the examples that can be taken from the value and importance of psychology in sport. Previously I discussed how more and more sports organisations are seeing the importance and value in player care and wellbeing and psychology is undoubtedly another facet of ensuring players are primed and ready off the pitch to perform to the best on it, and have sporting success be it in an individual or team sport environment. Leadership also plays a massive role and the type of leadership provided goes a long way to sporting success and the psychological nature of it.
References:
Brolin, C. 2017. In the Zone: How Champions Win Big, London, Blink Publishing
Gladwell, M. 2009. Outliers: The Story of Success. London: Penguin Books.
Hodge, K., Henry, G. & Smith, W. 2014. A Case Study of Excellence in Elite Sport: Motivational Climate in a World Champion Team. The Sport Psychologist, 28, 60–74.
Humphrey, J. & Hughes, D. 2021. The High Performance Podcast
Kerr, J. 2013. Legacy, Great Britain, Constable.
Lawlor, D. 2020. When The World Stops Watching: Life After The Game, London, Black & White Publishing.
Reng, R. 2011. A Life Too Short, London, Yellow Jersey Press
Williams, M. & Wigmore, T. 2020. The Best: How Athletes Are Made, London, Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
