How stressors are dynamically appraised within a team during a game: An exploratory study in basketball

Travel related changes in performance and physiological markers: the effects of eastward travel on female basketball players

[Purpose] Purpose of this study is to measure the changes in various physiological markers and performance criteria for women basketball players over the course of a travel heavy season. [Participants and Methods] Fifty one Division-II female basketball players and a control group of 54 females joined this study. Measurements began at the beginning of the competitive season and concluded with final measurements at the end of the competitive season. [Results] The female basketball players showed noticeable increases in resting salivary cortisol, visceral trunk fat, resting heart rate, and resting blood pressure. These athletes also showed diminishment in isokinetic force of leg muscles, particularly in knee flexion strength. Vertical jump measurements also indicated a slight diminishment. In contrast, the control group experienced none of the same changes. [Conclusion] Over the course of a grueling flight schedule in combination with a full-length basketball season, the female athletes in this study showed significant declinations in many indicators of overall health. It is concluded that resulting prolonged intermittent stress of a travel-heavy season can lead to significant changes in certain physiological markers with notable decreases in isokinetic force of leg muscle.

An extended validation of the Communal Coping Strategies Inventory for Competitive Team Sports: A multilevel approach

A questionnaire that can properly measure communal coping in sport is required to further investigate and understand how individuals in a team collectively cope with stressful sport situations. The Communal Coping Strategies Inventory for Competitive Team Sports (CCSICTS; Leprince et al., 2019) needed to be validated at the collective level and in its situational form to be used in broader sport situations. The aims of the present work were to improve and further validate the factorial structure of the CCSICTS at both individual and team levels. With a sample of 380 French athletes, representing 56 teams, Study 1 showed support for a multilevel, hierarchical and four-dimensional factorial structure of the revised version of the CCSICTS at both individual and team levels. With a sample of 641 French athletes, representing 75 teams, Study 2 confirmed the factorial structure obtained in Study 1 at individual and team levels, and its validity in sport-specific situations. The results of both studies also highlighted a bifactorial structure, allowing interpretation of communal coping as an overall team capacity to adapt to stress. As such, the psychometric qualities of the CCSICTS-R have been established at individual and team levels. The CCSICTS-R enables proper and distinct measurement of the characteristics of communal coping in sport (i.e., hierarchical, multidimensional, multilevel, both situational and dispositional) and can be used from both research and practical perspectives.

The Coping Strategies Used by Young Tunisian Athletes in Individual and Collective Sports

The objective of this study was to discover the repertoire of coping strategies used by young Tunisian male and female athletes in individual and team sports when competing in their sport, and to examine the effect of gender and type of sport on these strategies. A total of 917 young Tunisian athletes including 349 female athletes and 568 male athletes, aged 14 to 19, with an average age of 15.63 ± 1.5 years, participated in our study. Participants were invited to respond to the Arabic version of the Competitive Sport Adaptation Strategy Inventory to assess their coping repertoire. The results revealed that factors, such as gender, and type of sport, influenced the coping repertoire among young athletes. In the inter-personal and intra-personal context, young athletes used a wide variety of coping strategies, all of which were task-oriented and disengagement-oriented.

Development and Validation of a Well-Being Measure on Young Basketball Players: The NFAPW Scale

Basketball is a sport in which, beyond the physical and technical skills, the psychological aspects are a decisive factor and could negatively affect the well-being of the player. The present study analyzes how 11 items belonging to two stakeholders (coach and player) could negatively affect the well-being of the athlete. A sample of elite young basketball players (n = 121) consisting of 55 males and 66 females, ranging in age from 16 to 23 (M = 20.12 ± 1.71), completed the Negative Factors Affecting Players’ Well-being (NFAPW) Questionnaire. This questionnaire was designed ad hoc and demonstrated good psychometric properties that confirmed that it is a valid and reliable instrument to measure how those factors negatively affect their well-being. The results showed that females have a greater perception of the factors that negatively affect their well-being, especially those related to the actions of the coach. However, no differences were found regarding the experience. Although this research provides an initial tool for measuring the well-being of the player during competition, future studies are encouraged to provide guidance to the coaches and players in dealing with the psychological variables in a better way.

Coping in Teams: Exploring Athletes' Communal Coping Strategies to Deal With Shared Stressors

Although sport psychology research has mainly focused on stress and coping as intrapersonal processes, stressful circumstances are often experienced in social groups and coping emerges as a combination of individual and group effort (Tamminen and Gaudreau, 2014). Based on Lyons et al. (1998) model of communal coping, this study aimed to address the lack of knowledge about stress and coping as an interpersonal process, by exploring shared stressors and communal coping strategies within team sports. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 team sport athletes (seven males, three females; M _age = 26.3 years, SD _age = 7.67, range 15-38) who participated in different team sports (football, rugby, volleyball, ice hockey, and basketball). Data were analyzed using an inductive thematic analytic procedure. The results revealed four themes of shared stressors involving issues relating to social pressure, relationships between teammates, performance, or logistics and organization; and four themes of communal coping, namely: problem-focused communal efforts, relationship-focused coping, communal management of emotions, and communal goal withdrawal. The results provided empirical support to the communal coping model (Lyons et al., 1998) and extend understanding of coping processes as defined initially by the CMRT of emotion (Lazarus, 1999, 2000a). This study provided unique insight into the nature of communal coping in sport and performance setting, and specifically, how stressors are apprehended in team sports and how athletes can collaborate to deal with shared stressors during competitive encounters.

The Trier Social Stress Test and the Trier Social Stress Test for groups: Qualitative investigations

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and its version for groups (TSST-G) are the gold standard for inducing acute psychosocial stress in human experimental settings and have been used in numerous studies since the early 1990s. The TSST and the TSST-G lead to effects on different physiological and psychological markers, such as salivary cortisol, anxiety, and emotional states. These effects were assessed with quantitative methods comparing pre-test and post-test measures with statistical analyses. But to date, no qualitative analyses have been conducted to examine the meaningful experience of participants during the TSST and the TSST-G. This study is the first to conduct qualitative investigations to further clarify the stressful experience of participants confronted with these procedures. Preliminary results showed as expected that the TSST and the TSST-G effectively induced psychosocial stress, with cortisol levels, cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety, and arousal increases, and with pleasure and dominance decreases. At the qualitative level, the results evidenced that the two theoretically stressful components of the TSST and the TSST-G, namely social-evaluative threat and uncontrollability, were experienced as stress-inducing by the participants. Two case studies confirmed these findings. But the results also showed on one hand that psychosocial stress is a dynamic phenomenon, with important fluctuations throughout the tasks (mainly for the TSST-G); and on the other hand that despite the similar physiological and psychological responses between the TSST and the TSST-G evidenced by the literature, the experience of the participants was both similar and specific. Use of a qualitative method allowed us to provide a complementary point of view to understand the meaningful experience of participants during these stressful procedures, apprehending the dynamic of the subjective stress experience without disrupting it.