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Sports Psychology

Sports and Exercise Psychology and Counseling
Time management, burnout, fear of failure, anxiety, depression, and self-esteem problems are issues that many individuals face in every day living. For athletes, these forms of stress are increased significantly and are often over looked in order to gain victories, records, and championships. Often times, uncontrolled and unresolved emotions are seen as weakness and are neglected. Winning becomes everything but emotions and the psychological state of the athlete remain on the backburner. Sports Psychology is a rising field that has come into the mix to deal with these very issues. Sport Psychology is defined as the study of the effect of psychological and emotional factors on sport and exercise performance, and the effect of sport and exercise involvement on psychological and emotional factors (Cox, 2007). Athletes find them self entangled with anxiety, motivation, group dynamics, personality, confidence, and concentration. Each of these factors, affect the performance of the athlete. The Sports Psychologist takes the role of helping the athlete cope with the stressors of the game, the coach, the crowd, and the self with a goal to enhance overall well-being in and out of the sport.
Coaches often neglect their responsibility to positively influence behaviors and actions of the members on the team for the sake of a win. Wilson and Pritchard (2005) explained that athletes experience unique stressors related to their athletic status such as “extensive time demands; a loss of the ‘star status’ that many had experienced as high school athletes; injuries; the possibility of being benched/red-shirted their freshman year and conflicts with their coaches, among other factors” (as cited in Humphrey, Yow, & Bowden, 2000; Papanikolaou et al., 2003). Often times, these anxieties are overlooked and ridiculed by the coaches of these athletes. Effective coaches with healthy leadership are not threatening to their athletes. Their...