Current Female Collegiate Athletes, Anxiety, and Scale

The life of a collegiate athlete is not always the least stressful, Felsten & Wilcox (1993) say that anxiety/stress from just normal daily events can cause the athlete’s performance to be hindered or have problems. The idea of anxiety can be daunting on athletes as they over think things. Anshel, Williams, Williams, & Sheila, 2000; Covassin & Pero, 2004, talked about perceived level of anxiety or being a heightened awareness on a scale of anxiety/stress level (Raglin, 1992; Baker, Côté, & Hawes, 2000; Raglin & Hanin, 1999). Thus the original purpose of this present study, is to discover what type of anxiety the athletes are conducting. Once that is decided, we may be able to implement different methods to help relax the athlete and create a better environment for their performance.

Smith & Smoll (1990) created the instrument being used in this study. The questionnaire consists of fifteen questions asking about anxiety, worry, and concentration disruption. The information that we hope to gain from the survey was about what types of anxiety the female athletes are more prone to: i.e., worry, concentration disruption, or somatic anxiety. Smith, Smoll, & Schutz (1990) argue that in their study psychometric properties of the Sport Anxiety Scale are described, as are its relations with other psychological measure and with pre-competitions affective state measure.

Abstract

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the effects of a competitive season on perceived anxiety level of female collegiate swimmers. The participants involved in this study were a select group of collegiate swimmers, competing at the Division I level. The collegiate athletes ranged in age 18-22, and the participants were all female. There were 20- 25 athletes participating in the study. The questionnaire instrument (one for each meet distributed in a packet) was available for the season starting with the first meet. Along with the packet, there was a consent form that had to be signed prior to the athletes starting the questionnaires. IRB approved this study. The questionnaire (The Sports Anxiety Scale) created by Smith & Smoll (2006) consists of fifteen questions asking about anxiety, worry, and concentration disruption. The information that we hoped to gain from the survey would describe what types of anxiety the female athletes are more prone to manifest; like worry, concentration disruption, or somatic anxiety. Upon finishing the. No significant difference was found by time on somatic anxiety scale scores in Division I swimmers F(12, 132) = 1.79, p=.056, partial eta2 = .14. No significant difference was found by time on the worry scale scores in Division I swimmers F(12, 144) = 1.46, p=.144, partial eta2 = .10. No significant difference was found by time on the concentration disruption scale scores in Division I swimmers F (12, 132) = 1.52, p=.125, partial eta2 = .12.

However, even though significance was not found because of the end size of the group, there were important trends during two points of the season week six, and the final week of competition. In analyzing these trends from a journal kept of the competitive, season week six may have had a high peak in the anxiety due to different reasons. In discussing the finding with the head and assistant coach, week six was at the end of their Christmas training. That on it’s own is an extremely stressful situation, this could have added to the anxiety for that meet. Christmas training is an extremely rigorous schedule for the athletes they are training almost six hours a day for two weeks straight, while be located somewhere else in the United States. For the final week/meet days consisted of seniors finishing their last meet ever. It was also the freshmen’s' first college conference meet and the middle classes may have been stressed just because they wanted to perform their best and believe they needed to . The pressures to perform at conference was at an all time high.

Interpretation of the results informs us that this study should be repeated to understand the peaks and valleys of competition for female swimmers and to hopefully help in the future with intervention programs that may help even out the peaks and valleys.

Leadership Program Faculty:S. StollG. Goc-KarpK. JohnstonT. GoetzJ. Beller, WSU, Statistics/Measurement Consultant

Female Collegiate Athletics

Title IX was passed in 1972, “fewer than 32,000 women competed in intercollegiate athletics. Women received only 2% of schools’ athletic budgets, and athletic scholarships for women were nonexistent” (The Battle of Gender, p. 2). Currently the numbers have jumped tremendously. This has given women many more opportunities to come to school, while working towards a degree, as well as compete in what they love to do. With Title IX, the universities are required to equally disperse scholarships to males and females. As of now there are still less women than men who are collegiate athletes, The Battle of Gender, (2002) put the statistic of, “…170,384 men played college sports in 1971-72, [while] only 150,916 women played college sports in 2000-01” (p. 2). Today in the competitive world of sports women according to Cahn (1994) are forced to deal with a constant barrage of criticism from diehard defenders of a male sporting tradition, generations of twentieth-century female athletes and their advocates successfully carved a niche for women in a sporting culture whose deep identification with masculinity nevertheless remained unyielding. With “real” sport and “real” athletes defined as masculine, women of this century have occupied only a marginal space in the sports world and an even more tenuous position in athletic governance. Competitive swimming today is one of the female collegiate sports that are seen quite frequently at universities and athletes, especially women athletes, live in a highly competitive and stressful environment.

What is Anxiety?

Anxiety is defined as a state of apprehension, uncertainty, and fear resulting from the anticipation of a realistic or fantasized threatening event or situation, often impairing physical and psychological functioning (Ansel, Porter, & Quek, 1998). When anxiety affects the competitors’ mindset, the athlete makes a decision to have it either negatively affect performance or positively enhance performance (Legrand & LeScanff, 2003). If the athlete is positive and motivated for their race or competition, he/she will then have a higher chance of performing well (Grove & Stoll, 1998; Alexander & Krane, 1996; Krane, 1994). Legrand & LeScanff (2003) also state that low arousal somatic emotions would not seem to be likely or appropriate during most highly active sport competitions. Successful athletes usually evoke strong emotions. That also can be turned to a negative though if the athlete is overly aroused they have so much anxiety they cannot focus properly on the competition (Hall, Kerrr, & Matthews, 1998; Bahrke & Morgan, 1978).

Sponsored by the Center for ETHICS*Sponsored by the Center for ETHICS*University of IdahoUniversity of Idaho

Sports Anxiety Scale

The scale being used in this research is to help detect what type of anxiety the athletes are having throughout the weeks of competition. Smith and Smoll (1990) describe the development and validation of a sport-specific measure of cognitive and somatic trait anxiety. The Sport Anxiety Scale measures individual differences in Somatic Anxiety and in two classes of cognitive anxiety, Worry and Concentration Disruption. The idea of this instrument helped Anshel (2001) look at the model, and the coping process, [that] beings with the athlete’s perception of the event or detection of a stimulus (Hackfort & Spielberger, 1989). We examined whether a leveling off or an increase in worry, anxiety and stress increased as the season progressed.