A recent study investigating the mental health of athletes at the FINA World Championships in 2019 revealed that nearly 25% of the participants met the criteria for depression, and 45% expressed a desire for or a need for psychotherapeutic support. These findings underscore the importance of mental health support and resources for high performance athletes.
Use double quotes to find documents that include the exact phrase: "aerodynamic AND testing"
Use double quotes to find documents that include the exact phrase: "aerodynamic AND testing"
The registration process provides an initial glance into your organization for participants. Some tips for creating a more inclusive registration process, with 2SLGBTQI+ participants in mind, include providing a text box where participants can indicate their pronouns and asking participants for their preferred name in addition to their given name.
In recent years, the sporting community has gotten better at spotting and treating sports-related concussions, however there remain many questions surrounding preventive measures. Exploring whether neck size or strength correlates with reduced concussion risk has found that formal neck strengthening programs show promise in reducing risk, particularly among amateur athletes.
While many popular protein sources for athletes exist such as red meats and chicken, there is a growing need for more ecological sources of protein. Insect-based protein could be a game-changer in athletes’ nutrition, offering a potential alternative to traditional supplements.
This study showed that female athletes exhibited more positive attitudes towards seeking help and held higher expectations regarding counseling compared to male athletes. These findings shed light on potential gender-related disparities in the perception of mental health support in sport, emphasizing the need for tailored approaches to adapt to the diverse needs of athletes.
Many trans athletes report negative experiences in sport. A contributing factor is a lack of sport policies addressing trans inclusion. Accordingly, researchers have highlighted the need for sport organizations to develop inclusive policies that are created and updated based on research.
Increasing the visibility of girls and women in program advertising can help demonstrate that your organization is inclusive. Research shows that it is important that imagery includes girls and women of different backgrounds and body shapes and sizes to help ensure that all women and girls can picture themselves participating in your sport.
A study of professional athletes’ willingness to pay for offsetting greenhouse gas emissions reveals a promising intersection between sports participation and environmental sustainability efforts with a majority of participants showing readiness to financially support green initiatives. Key strategies include raising environmental awareness, demonstrating event sustainability, leveraging social influence, and collaborating with environmental organizations. These strategies may also attract eco-conscious participants, underlining the critical role sports can play in promoting environmental stewardship!
In sports, some athletes currently under-perform compared to others, but end up excelling later in life, while some who currently perform well, end up under-performing later on. In other words, current performance is not necessarily a good predictor of potential in sports.
This makes it a major challenge for scouts, who are responsible for spotting young talent and predicting who will succeed at higher levels of competition, to identify and predict future success based only on current performance. Many successful athletes were not recognized early on but ended up excelling and exceeding expectations, making them ‘sleepers’ in sports terminology. While this type of overlooked talent has drawn attention in media and some theoretical work, there’s been little scientific research on sleepers.
The players and parameters
Our study included 95 male junior elite ice-hockey players aged 15 or 16 years old. They all played in one of the 3 highest levels possible for their age in Canada and were all eligible for the 2019 yearly draft of a Major Junior league in Canada. Among this group, 70 players were drafted after the second round (37th or later). Three years later, professional scouts identified 15 of those players as sleepers. Tests were done on the players’ personal characteristics, their ability to manage their learning, and their hockey-specific skills like anticipation, decision-making, and eye-movements while watching video sequences. This study was done with the Québec Remparts.
Insights into sleepers
This study is the first to focus on sleepers, showing it’s possible to identify them by looking at self-regulation and perceptual-cognitive skills. Understanding sleepers can help teams find valuable players that scouts may overlook. We found that sleepers had better planning skills and different eye movements when watching videos. These traits helped us identify sleepers accurately among late-drafted players.
These results provide insights into these highly sought-after sleepers who are often overlooked by scouts, but who defy the odds and provide value to teams able to identify them. We hypothesized that sleepers would have better reflection abilities, better decision-making, and distinct gaze behaviours when watching video clips; which were partially confirmed.
The findings show that a combination of those psychological characteristics was strikingly successful in identifying sleepers among late-drafted players. A combination of planning abilities and eye movements correctly identified 12 of 15 sleepers, while only identifying 8 of 55 other late-drafted players as sleepers. Later analysis revealed that almost all sleepers (14 of 15) belonged to a sub-population of players with higher self-regulatory skills. This is in line with other studies that found differences in self-regulatory and perceptual-cognitive skills between groups of athletes, with our study extending this by revealing similar findings within athletes with a very similar skill level. This suggest that athletes’ psychological profiles, even when measured within 45 minutes, may be a promising indicator of potential when identifying future talent.
Our predictive model was surprisingly successful in identifying sleepers. Better planning abilities and distinct eye movements (that is, more Areas of Interest (AOIs) fixated and fewer fixations) predicted 40% of the variance and correctly classified almost 85% of the late-selected players when sleepers were identified by experienced scouts. These results support the idea that psychological characteristics hold promise for talent identification. This could be even more true when trying to identify sleepers, as players selected later in a draft are often considered to be physically and technically similar, leaving psychological characteristics as one of the few ways to differentiate those players.
One surprising finding is that birth month didn’t affect sleepers as it did other players. This suggests an over-representation of those born later in the selection year amongst the group of sleepers. Usually, coaches favour players born soon after the cut-off date, thinking they’re more talented due to their physical maturity. But among sleepers, birth month didn’t matter much. We found two groups among late-drafted players, mainly based on their self-regulation skills. This approach was surprisingly successful in identifying sleepers: the group with higher self-regulatory skills included a much larger proportion of sleepers.
Strengths and limitations
A key strength of this study was our use of a cognitive and quantitative approach to assess talent in ice hockey drafts. However, the results might not apply to other contexts like women’s hockey or selections for the NHL at 18. Also, players’ development at 15 isn’t complete, so traits for success may change over time.
Conclusions
The main findings of the study were that psychological characteristics, especially gaze behaviour and self-regulation skills, predicted high achievement 3 years later among late-drafted ice-hockey players. This suggests scouts could use psychological profiles to make better selections, especially in later rounds of drafts.
The next steps will be:
- linking the psychological components (data collected at younger age) to data in games several years later (and eventually to link these components to very long-term success).
- a survey of lateral preference in ice hockey
- a study of the development of laterality in ice hockey.
- a study of temporal expertise of ice hockey players.
Funding acknowledgement: This blog draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Sport Canada as part of the Sport Participation Research Initiative.
Elite or high-performance athletes often demand an immense focus on health factors outside of sport, such as nutrition and recovery. A recent study conducted on male and female high-performance athletes found that approximately 8.3 hours of sleep were necessary to feel rested. Despite this, an overwhelming majority, 71%, fail to meet this requirement.