The Importance of Sports Psychology

Every year during the month of March  basketball is highly covered due to March Madness. A lot of people fill out brackets with hopes of their favorite college team winning the NCAA Championship. Imagine if your favorite players in this tournament could perform better in games if they utilized their resources. This is the topic of Chris Gee's article How does Sport Psychology Actually Improve Athletic Performance? With the NBA, NFL, MLB and other sports organizations generating so much popularity, sports Psychology has transformed into a very popular topic; both as an academic area of study and practice. Sport Psychologists aim at to help athletes develop a well prepared mental state that should prove them successful when playing their sports. Many athletes and coaches are unaware or misinformed about what sport psychologist actually do, and as a result do not utilize these resources that can help prove them successful. The behavior modification article by Chris Gee aims “to provide the reader with a simple framework depicting how mental skills training translates into improved within-competition performance.” Gee provided the reader with background information about sports psychology and reasoning as to why athletes and coaches do not use the sport psychologists. Gee argues that athletes and coaches do not utilize their resources in sports psychology, and if they would athletes performance would be better.

The author first starts off with a brief history of sports psychology and how it has developed its current role in today society. Sports psychology is a relatively new area of study that began to emerge in the 1960s. Sports psychology has become very popular due to the emphasis and importance we place on athletics such as the NBA, NFL, or MLB. Athletics have become a very social thing that has developed into a cultural phenomenon and has garnered a large and diverse fan base. Sports Psychology combines a cultural phenomenon with a popular area of study. Though sports psychology is popular, athletes and coaches are not taking advantage of these services.

The first reason the author lists for athletes not utilizing the advantages of sport psychologists is that there is a genera lack of understanding “about the process and techniques that comprise a common sport psychology.” Some studies have even suggested that many athletes and coaches view sport psychologist in the same way psychiatrists, counselors, and “shrinks.” They feel as if they would be laying on a couch getting psychoanalyzed when that is not the case at all. The author then furthers his reasoning by sstating, many people in the sports industry think that sports psychologist are only for ““problem” athletes and thus not part of a general performance enhancement strategy” and stray way from the services.”

Then author then provides the reader with brief terminology sections that discusses words that pertains to an athlete’s athletic ability such as absolute and relative performance. The author provides the readers with examples that show how both an athlete’s relative and absolute performance both seem to increase with the help of a sport psychologist. The author then discusses the mental side of sports performance that sport psychology could greatly help such as the many different anxieties athletes at time experience such as precompetitive and elevated anxiety. Many people believe the mind and body are connected, so if an athlete is experiencing this it can negatively affect their performance.

The author then goes into strategies that sports psychologist use that improves overall sports performance. For example, many cognitive anxieties are dealt with “strategies that teach the athlete to be cognizant of his or her internal negative dialog and to replace these thoughts with more positive and reaffirming statements.” When dealing with somatic anxiety, there are many strategies that aim at helping athletes regulate their autonomic arousal response (i.e., relax themselves) by first teaching them what heightened arousal feels like and then relaxation strategies aimed at reducing it. These

In conclusion, the article How does Sport Psychology Actually Improve Athletic Performance? by Chris Gee was about how sport psychology has a lot of resources that many of the athletes coaches do not take advantage of. Gee argued that if they were to utilize the resources, athletic performance would be greatly improved. He provided the reader with background information about sports psychology and reasoning as to why athletes and coaches do not use the sport psychologists.

Works Cited

Gee, Chris. "How Does Sport Psychology Actually Improve Athletic Performance? A Framework to Facilitate Athletes' and Coaches' Understanding." Behavior Modification. SAGE Journals. Web. Mar. 2012. <http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/34/5/386.short>