For youth sport people generally believe that sports help children develop self-confidence, discipline, teamwork skills, resiliency, moral thinking, and other individual strengths. Sometimes, the darker side of youth sports is apparent: young athletes might develop aggressive behavior and the need to dominate their opponents on and off the field. (more…)
Attention is the ability of an athlete to keep on task. It is often also called focus or concentration. Attention involves focusing mental effort on relevant environmental cues, and maintaining that attention. In sport settings people like to use the term concentration. (more…)
The Inverted U Hypothesis suggests that optimal performance occurs at an intermediate level of arousal while both low and high levels of arousal will result in impaired performance. (more…)
The most popular account for the relationship between arousal and performance is the model of Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning (Hanin, 1997, 2000). IZOF proposes that there are individual differences in the way people react to anxiety. Some tend to succeed when anxiety is low while others tend to succeed when anxiety is high. (more…)