Journal of Applied Sport Psychology

While research on mental health and wellbeing in elite sports has increased, there are few studies regarding models of care for responding to mental health needs in this population. The Australian Institute of Sport established the Mental Health Referral Network (MHRN) service in 2018, initially focused on mental health care for elite athletes only, but subsequently extended to include elite coaches, high-performance support staff and sports administration staff. This study used a convergent mixed-methods service evaluation to examine service users’ experiences with the care provided by the MHRN. The quantitative component comprised an online survey with n = 84 service users (athletes, coaches, high-performance support staff, and sports administration staff). The qualitative component comprised semi-structured interviews, analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, with a subset of n = 20 athletes, coaches, and high-performance support staff. Service users indicated high satisfaction with the support received and valued the no-cost, timely access model of care provided by practitioners with expertise in elite sport. Most participants (88.3%) positively viewed the practitioners being external to (i.e., not affiliated with) their daily training environment. This helped alleviate concerns about mental health stigma, confidentiality breaches, and potential consequences of disclosing mental ill-health (e.g., deselection) within their sport settings. Service users also emphasized the need to consider longer-term pathways for more intensive support where necessary, in addition to considering the long-term sustainability of the MHRN to ensure continued access to support. Findings may inform sporting organizations in their decision-making about service delivery models and future service development activities.

While significant research has focused on athlete mothers returning to competition, the experiences of retired athlete mothers remain largely unexplored. In this study we explored the less studied research path of motherhood and sport retirement to learn more about these athletes’ lives. We sought to build on sport media research centralizing elite athlete mothers, and qualitative research on athlete mother career transitions, to provide insight into identities post-elite sport in a cultural context (i.e., Instagram). The precise aim was to explore how identities intertwined with ethic of care meanings in digital stories and the psycho-social implications during retirement. Two retired Canadian athlete mothers’ (i.e., mountain biker Catharine Pendrel and boxer Mandy Bujold) Instagram posts (n=72 for Pendrel, n=162 for Bujold) were subjected to big and small story narrative analysis. A big story of legacy through generativity was identified and linked with ethic of care meanings depending on three small stories: giving back, inspiring the next generation, and self-connections through sport. These findings show how a concern for current and future generations through pro-social behaviours (e.g., philanthropy, imparting wisdom, time with children) are intertwined with multiple relational identities (e.g., elite athlete, mother, mentor, generative athlete) and nuanced ethics of care (e.g., self-care, everyday acts of situated caring). We conclude with what these findings and digital stories offer practitioners, closing with future research suggestions.

The purpose of this study was to conduct a pre-intervention team resilience needs assessment in the context of high-performance women’s football. The needs assessment included a review of the literature, focus group discussions, and input from an expert steering group. Following scoping meetings with senior personnel from the National Governing Body, teams in the top two tiers of a professional women’s football league and within the academy structure were contacted. Five focus groups made up of football players were conducted. Altogether, 27 participants (Mage = 23.96, SD = 4.49) took part. The focus groups were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis from a critical realist standpoint. The study identified the contextual stressors that high-performance women’s football teams encounter (i.e., organizational stressors arising from a newly professionalized environment and on-pitch stressors arising from low social resources), effective team resilience practices currently employed by group members (i.e., establishing a strong foundation for high quality relationships; unity in managing pressure; and learning from setbacks to inform future preparation for adversity) and the perceived gaps for team resilience development (i.e., limited effectiveness and inconsistent use of deliberate pressure training; inadequate psycho-social resources; and lack of effective proactive group level strategies during pressure). The study highlighted the importance of a systematic needs assessment within an Intervention Mapping Framework prior to undertaking an intervention as several nuances to the specific context of high-performance women’s football were identified.

The capacity to demonstrate resilience is important for performance and development outcomes in youth soccer. A key feature of resilience is the demonstration of positive behavioral responses to pressures or setbacks, yet little research exists on the specific behaviors that characterize resilience in the youth soccer literature. This study aimed to explore the behavioral indicators of resilience through focus groups and interviews with 60 participants from six professional soccer academies and one National Soccer Governing Body. The data was collected in two phases, the first involved a discussion of the observable behaviors associated with resilience in youth soccer. In the second phase, participants reflected on examples of resilience behaviors alongside video clips. These acted as a stimulus to contextualize the behaviors arising from the first phase. Content analysis was used to analyze the data and 36 behaviors were identified across six themes: (a) teammate support-focused (e.g., verbal support following mistakes), (b) emotion-focused (e.g., displaying emotional regulation), (c) effort-focused (e.g., physical efforts to overcome challenge), (d) rebound (e.g., positive reactions to a mistake), (e) robust (e.g., showing composure when under pressure), and (f) learning-focused (e.g., willingness to accept feedback). The results offer an insight into a multifaceted range of resilience behaviors in the context of youth soccer. With this knowledge, practitioners can make informed decisions around player development by assessing specific behavioral metrics related to resilience, players can engage in structured self-reflection practices pertaining to resilience development, and researchers can work toward the development of validated observational tools for resilience assessment.

Historically within UK professional football environments, women’s coaching representation has been low, irrespective of gender participation. The involvement of women coaches in the context of men’s football has been contested due to dominant hegemonic masculinity. For the limited number of women coaches in the men’s game, there is a need for deeper contextual understanding of how organizational dynamics and minority status intersect to shape well-being. Auto-driven photo-elicitation was employed to explore a woman coach’s well-being experiences longitudinally over a season whilst working in a men’s professional football club. Bioecological theory was utilized as a theoretical lens to enrich participant interpretations and sensemaking, and longitudinal interpretative phenomenological analysis (LIPA) was implemented to analyze interview data at four time points. Four experiential themes were created: “I can’t hide that I am a woman, so it is gonna be different for me”, “I don’t really know which direction to go in”, “I’m trying to get the balance between professional and personal life”, and “If I’m not coaching, what am I?”. Our findings illuminated that the woman coach excessively worked to progress their career in the men’s side of the game, which had deleterious consequences for well-being (e.g., neglecting wider aspects of life). Being an authentic self and seeking a third space away from work and home-life commitments were perceived as therapeutic for well-being. Well-being sensemaking was enriched by utilizing an auto-driven photo-elicitation approach. Our work acts as a springboard for future work to creatively explore well-being within varying sports coaching contexts.

Achievement Goal Theory (AGT) is an interactionist theory that predicts that motivation is determined by the interaction of dispositional goals and the motivational climate. The ‘matching hypothesis’ predicts that that motivation is optimal when there is congruency between dispositional goal orientation (DGO) and motivational climate (MC). The matching hypothesis is tacitly accepted as an important element in goal setting interventions by many practitioners, but few studies have tested the short-term motivational effects of matching on sport tasks. This issue was addressed by examining the interaction between DGO and MC on objective measures of performance of 138 advanced athletes (Experiment 1) and 139 recreational athletes (Experiment 2) on a 400m run, and on 154 recreational athletes’ ability to shoot basketball free-throws (Experiment 3). Moderated hierarchical regression revealed that the ego MC improved performance of more advanced athletes by 2 seconds, irrespective of their DGO (Experiment 1) and improved performance of recreational athletes by 2.4 seconds, unless the athletes had both high task and low ego DGO (Experiment 2). The MC had no effect on free-throw performance, but the ego MC significantly reduced confidence (Experiment 3). The facilitatory effect of ego climate on performance was mediated by the value athletes attached to ego goals, such that bigger improvement was seen in athletes who most valued ego goals. The parsimonious interpretation of these data is that aligning MC with DGO does not optimize short-term motivation. However, an ego MC can elicit enhanced performance in short duration tasks that rely on cardiovascular effort.

The experience of a collective underperformance of a sport team in an important competition is often accompanied by the experience of extreme emotions, such as anxiety or anger, and their expression through certain behaviors, for example including body language or verbal communication (e.g., Apitzsch, 2009; Wergin et al., 2018). In many cases, the display of unhelpful emotions (i.e. emotions perceived to be detrimental to well-being and performance by an individual) through certain facial expressions, behaviors, or interactions with teammates evokes further mistakes and the maintenance of a team’s underperformance (e.g., van Kleef, 2009; Wergin et al., 2018). Emotions, emotional expressions, and interactions between athletes are thus crucial in both evoking and maintaining a collective collapse in a team. It has been hypothesized that the effectiveness of and the effort spent on emotion regulation may be key in a team’s experience of a collective collapse (Wergin et al., 2022). Initial findings support the idea that emotion regulation may play a crucial role in the development of a team collapse out of a critical event but further research exploring team collapse is needed (Wergin et al., 2024). Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies and the level of depletion experienced as a consequence of emotion regulation in team collapse situations compared to similar game situations not leading to a team collapse. Identifying potential differences in the use of emotion regulation strategies and their effectiveness may directly inform practice, as emotion regulation strategies are tangible behavioral actions that athletes can execute to improve team performance or avoid in specific game situations to avert a potential collapse.

This study explores the impact of app-based imagery and traditional methods (i.e., reflective diary) on cognitive-specific (CS) imagery in junior national squash athletes. A total of 75 participants (mean age = 15.22, SD = 2.14) without prior imagery training were allocated into app-based imagery (n = 25), reflective diary (n = 25), and control groups (n = 25). After an imagery workshop and a 12-week reinforcement, CS imagery scores were assessed pretest, post-test, and follow-up using the Sport Imagery Questionnaire (SIQ), as well as technical shot execution (i.e., drive, boast, dropshot, lob, and volley). Using one-way repeated measures analysis of variance and the Friedman test, we examined differences in CS imagery and technical skills across timepoints. The app-based group showed significant improvements in SIQ scores at post- (F(2,72) = 58.53, p < .001, η2 = 0.61) and follow-up tests (F(2,72) = 97.31, p < .001, η2 = 0.73), as well as in technical skills (drive, χ2(2) = 40.92, p < 0.001; boast, χ2(2) = 45.81, p < 0.001; dropshot, χ2(2) = 38.57, p < 0.001; lob, χ2(2) = 42.51, p < 0.001; volley, χ2(2) = 41.81, p < 0.001). A post-hoc analysis revealed that the app-based imagery group experienced the most substantial effect, surpassing reflective diary and control groups, indicating the effectiveness of app-based interventions in enhancing CS imagery and technical performance. The results demonstrate that mobile applications represent a practical and effective substitute for traditional imagery and mental skill reinforcement techniques, rendering these essential tools more accessible to athletes.