Essay Example on Sports Psychology

Introduction

Human beings are in most cases motivated t assign causes to their behaviors and actions. This act of assigning a cause to a particular behavior, act, or decision. In social psychology, attribution theory model is concerned with how people explain the cause of an event or behavior or both. The attribution theory asserts that the numerous possible explanations to a behavior or an event can be narrowed downed to few categories. The most basic categories are stability, locus of causality, and locus of control.

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Soccer Success

Lucille’s soccer performance in high-school tremendous and has been motivated by the outcome goals. However, after receiving a scholarship to play in college, her performance has been struggling and she is becoming demotivated. Lucille’s problem lies in three areas: her locus of control (attitude, commitment, confidence, training), locus of causality (teammates relationship, field condition, game time, and team competitiveness), and finally stability (agility, stamina, accuracy, and endurance). Lucille’s soccer performance is strongly based on achievement goal theory, which is “a psychological theory of intrinsic motivation that focuses on how beliefs and cognitions orient us towards achievement or success, especially in relation to task mastery and ego performance (Kremer, Moran, Walker, & Craig, 2012). She measures her success based on the outcome goals. This approach poses a great risk to her sport psychological health since soccer, although is influenced by one’s efforts, the extrinsic factors are more dominant, such as team effort, opposition strength, and effectiveness of the strategy.

It is critical to not that Lucille is still new to the college and thus her chemistry with the teammates is not very stable. Her relationship with the team is fairly unstable and this explains why the teammates are unwilling to pass the ball to her. To successfully develop a more solid relationship with the rest of the team members, Lucille needs to spend more time with the team as well as training. This way, she will be able to master how the other communicate, connect with the team, and develop a strong bond. Doing so will eliminate the negative attitude she has towards her teammates.

The second issue is weak endurance, agility, and stamina which has negatively affected her consistency in playing time. This issue is primarily based on her internal control her attitude, physical strength and training. Lucille needs to spend more time on training to strengthen her physique, agility, and overall skills especially with shooting and crossing. She also needs to focus more on the competitive goal rather than achievement/outcome perspective. This way, she has less burden put on individual herself.

Conclusion

Another key areas Lucille needs to understand is that soccer is more of a team effort rather than an individual effort. By incorporating the other team members to be as resilient and outcome oriented as her (share the same perspective and objective), it will create a more conducive and friendly environment to win. Moreover, Lucille needs to understand that there some things that are beyond our control. Such factors and time, the competitive power of the opponents, and the condition of the field. While these factors affect the performance, it does not mean the they define how to play the game. Team spirit is critical and thus should trying to fit in the team as she continues to train.

References

Kremer, J., Moran, A., Walker, G., & Craig, C. (2012). Chapter 3.15: Achievement Goal Theory. In Key Concepts in Sport Psychology (pp. 80-85). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Retrieved from 10.4135/9781446288702.n15.