Psychological States Influence on My Athletes' Performance in Pressure Situations (Term Paper Sample)

Case Study: Psychological States Influence on My Athletes’ Performance in Pressure Situations
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Case Study: Psychological States Influence on My Athletes’ Performance in Pressure Situations
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According to a famous American Basketball player and coach, John Wooden, “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be fatal.” Founded on the quote, in the modern sports world, most coaches and athletes strive for success in each competition. The ability to achieve this success entails many factors that range from the individual performance of the sportspersons, the pressure arising from body arousal, team effort, the relationship between athletes and coaches, the spirit of the team and their mental or psychological state of mind. However, teams in frequent instances are subject to a poor run of results in spite of the training, the relationship, team effort, and other factors being favorable (Ranta, La, Garcia-Lopez, & Marttunen, 2015). 
Based on the situation of the case study, team players, as well as the coach, are involved after the team’s habit of suffering losses at the semi-final level for the past three years. As the coach, I have been with the team for the previous three years. In spite of the players being good at the start of competitions as well as in warm-up and training sessions, the team has often suffered losses at the critical elimination stages of the contest even at times suffering losses from the teams they beat in preliminary stages. For this reason, a sense of concern is eminent for the failure of the team to live up to their ability and perform optimally at critical moments because of immense pressure. As an experienced coach, I have concluded that the continued failure to win crucial matches attributes to the psychological state of mind of the players before these crucial games.
Circumstances
In many instances, the heat of competition, particularly at the elimination stages, often acts as a way of arousal and pressure, which motivate players to maximum performances. However, the two factors can be detrimental especially when the psychological state of mind comes into play through the players over thinking, hence, becoming more aroused. Arousal is simply a body’s reaction to thoughts (Carlstedt, 2013). The over arousal results in pressure, which negatively affects the performance. Pressure begins in mind and starts with a negative pattern of the performance, which transmits to other body parts such as muscle, which tense while the mind races causing fear and anxiety (Murphy, 2012). As a result, an excellent team with a superb run of performance may become a victim of this arousal evident in their psychological mind-state leading to a sudden poor performance.
This sudden poor performance attributing from psychological mind-state is the case for my team, which has been performing excellently in other stages of the performance but fail to turn up for the big crucial occasions for three consecutive years. Moreover, the situation is worrying considering that the team has lost in these semi-finals both at home and away, which clearly validates the reason for the failure being their psychological state of mind. The players often become over arousal, which results in over-thinking. The over thinking creates anxiety and pressure leading to the unexpectedly poor performance (Gorrie, 2009). 
Focus of the Case Study
Conclusively, the team’s psychological state of mind is the basis of their sudden poor performances at the semi-finals and the final stages in the last three years. The assertion attributes to the manner in which psychological state of mind affects the momentum of the players. For instance, positive momentum is evident when the psychological state of mind is positive resulting to positive results while negative momentum occurs in situations where the psychological state of mind negatively influences the momentum of players forcing the players to be under pressure, which results in poor results. A number of theories expound on the impact of the psychological state of mind on the players’ performance.
Attentional Control Theory of Anxiety
Attentional control theory premises on the assumption that humans have two attentional systems. The first attentional system is goal-directed, which bases on human intentions, knowledge, and current goals. The second attentional system is stimulus driven, which responds maximally to the most salient or behaviorally relevant cues. As a result, the state of mind plays a significant role in creating anxiety, which influences performance by reducing the processing and temporary storage capacity of working memory, which is a brain system that uses the goal-directed attentional system to draw attention to a task as well as inhibit distraction from task-irrelevant stimulus or responses (Stone, Stone, & Sands, 2007). With anxiety, the apparent balance between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional system is disrupted causing a rise in the influence of the stimulus-driven system along with a decline in the effect of the goal-directed system.
In the instance of the team, the failed performances at the critical level are an orchestration of the imbalance between the goal-directed and the stimulus-driven systems. The imbalance in these systems increased the allocation attention to threat-related and task-irrelevant stimuli forcing the players to respond to the situation as well as at the same time reduce on-task attentional focus. The threat related factors, which influenced the performance of the players both at home and away, are both external (the hostile away crowd noise) and internal (worry about the performance in front of a home crowd) (Gruszka, Matthews, & Szymura, 2010). For this reason, the loss in the away playing was because of the team players focusing on the offensive away crowd noise making them not to pick the relevant information for the task. In contrast, the loss at home was because of the worry that the players had on the nature of performance they can offer in the presence of the home crowd, which forced them to miss also the task-relevant information.
Distraction Theory
The distraction theory proposes that pressure always fashions a distracting environment that compromises the working memory. A working memory is a short-term memory structure, which is in an active state that sustains a limited amount of information significant to the task at hand. For this reason, if the capacity of the working memory to sustain focus on a task is disrupted, the performance will automatically suffer (Mestre & Ross, 2011). The distraction theory acknowledges that players will fail to achieve desired results if their attention is drawn from the task at hand to other internal (for instance, worry or anxious state of mind) or external factors (for example irrelevant information). Choking at a critical level of competition such as semi-finals among players often results from the players failing to pay attention to the task.
In the case of my team, where the performance at the elimination stage was a manifestation of multiple external demands, skill failure at both the individual player and team level resulted from the attention of the players being distracted away from the critical task, which was to perform and win the matches. The perceptual information, which manipulates the decision-making ability of the players during the task, distracted the working memory of the players, which resulted in the losses at these stages not because of lack of skills to perform but because of distractions.
Self-Focus Theory
Self-focus theory alleges that the capacity of players to perform depends on the manner that they focus on small details of carrying out the performance. As a result, a team is destined for failure if their attention is drawn to little details on how to carry on the task. Choking occurs from paying too much attention to the task. Self-focus theory induces a comparison of the players’ present state with the salient standard, meaning that when the standard of the players is striking, there will be an enhancement of behavioral conformity. Nonetheless, it crucial to note that self-focus is only phenomenological in particular circumstances (Lovaglia, 2007).
In the case of my team, it is conclusive that the poor performance, which has characterized the team for the last three years during critical moments, is an orchestration of the team as well as me, the coach, focusing on small details of these performances. The focus can be apparent in the manner that I desire the team to play, more intense training during the preparations for the matches as well as the warming up before the start of the game. For this reason, the team is often typified by self-focused attention where individual players repeatedly evaluate themselves based on what has recently happened trying to decide how well they have been performing (Strongman, 1995). Therefore, the players are always in a state where they analyze and reanalyze their ability to sustain the good performanc...