Horse psychology is a relatively new subject, at least for most people, and once they recover from laughing out loud at even the suggestion of it, they proceed to paint a picture of a horse lying on the psychologist’s couch and opening up about its troubles. Of course, such a view is desperately naive, and the world has moved on from such a stance. However, for many sportsmen, the idea of sports psychology has remained for a long time an equally bizarre option. The macho rugged sportsmen do not need to open up to psychologists and if they need psyching up all they have to do is hit their heads against a brick wall and count to ten as loudly as possibly.
school of sport
with TIM MIDDLETON
In a previous article we considered how coaches tend to select their players either on the youngster’s physique or performance but there is another area that they should consider, and that is the players’ personality. That might sound extreme but it is a view presented increasingly in professional sport where teams do employ psychologists to assist them not just in their performances but also in their actual selection. We noted in that article that science is increasingly playing a part in helping sports coaching so we should not be surprised that another area of scientific knowledge and expertise should be employed, namely that of psychology.
We will also recall how we have noted previously how important the mental side of sport has become: attitude is as crucial as aptitude. Players and coaches try to affect their opponents’ mental state in order to try to gain an advantage; they do this in a more sophisticated and scientific way nowadays, rather than employing habits of sledging, taunting and abusing. However, it is also true that they need to try to improve their own mental state so that they can perform better physically.
So professional teams now use psychologists to help to motivate the players, to overcome the stress and pressure that now comes into sport, to assist players to think straight through difficult periods, to handle depression that might come from injuries, setbacks, defeats and disappointments. They may do all of this through the use of mental imagery, through goal setting, through attention control, through anger management, through inter-personal skills (so that the team is one big happy family). They are there to assist players to overcome problems, enhance performance, achieve goals and cope with competitiveness.
However, there is another area where the sports psychologist has proved to be most useful and that is in defining personality. Increasingly sports coaches are being advised and are recognising that personality plays a key part in a player’s success; certain types of personality are better suited to different positions. It follows therefore that some children will be better suited to different sports, different positions within those sports, and different roles within those sports. Some personalities will be suited to the front row of the scrum while others would not; they even would say that the personality required for an inside centre is a different personality to that required of an outside centre, even though they are found very close to each other on the field of play.
In rugby, the place kicker needs to be entirely focused on the posts when attempting a kick at goal; he needs to have tunnel vision that shuts out every other sight, noise or movement as he carefully goes through his pre-prepared routine. Very often the fly half is the player who undertakes the kicking duties and yet the position of fly half requires the player to be able to see space, to see the whole field of play, to be fully aware of all that is happening around him. In that regard, the personality suitable for a fly half is not the same as that suited to the place kicker; the place kicker is in the wrong position if he is at fly half, the sports psychologists would argue.
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There is no suggestion here that we should be employing sports psychologists for school teams but what we perhaps do need to understand and respect is that a sports coach does need to be aware of the psychological aspect of coaching a team and of children playing sport. So let us lie down for a moment on that couch and consider carefully where we place our youngsters, lest they end up with severe psychological difficulties as a result. Why? Because this comes straight from the horse’s mouth. Personality plays a big part in sport.
- Tim Middleton is a former international hockey player and headmaster, currently serving as the Executive Director of the Association of Trust Schools Email: [email protected]
