Method and Results

After our first interview with Sophie, we considered her personality, responses to the initial questions and comments from her coach and Sophie herself. After working with Sophie to develop her own goals we constructed an action plan to help Sophie reach these goals. The first goal was to 'increase the players confidence in her ability to perform skills within a competitive hockey situation.' The second goal was to 'improve the athletes resilience during and after a game, in order to boost self confidence and achieve adherence.'

After the initial interview we sent Sophie off with an understanding of what she needed to do and the means to do this. We told her to work with her coach to tailor her training around areas that need improving as well as highlighting areas she succeeds in. We then consulted her coach privately and discussed what we found during our interview with Sophie. We suggested that he work with the team to increase their cohesion, decreasing feelings of judgement when mistakes are made. We also discussed how he could improve the teams opinions of errors, highlighting their importance to learning and improvement.

After the first three weeks, we met with Sophie again to discuss her progress and to alter the intervention methods as necessary.

Following the results of the second performance profile and competitive state anxiety inventory, we decided to turn the focus of the intervention more towards Sophie and her personal input , rather than the coach and improvement of the team as a whole. This will allow Sophie to improve on her own after the duration of the intervention, decreasing her dependency on us and her coach. In order to do this, we got her to reflect on both good and bad aspects of her own performance after each game and training session. We asked her to identify what had gone wrong and how she could use this to improve her future performance. From this, we aimed to change her perspective of errors.

After another three weeks, we met with Sophie for the third and final time. Again, we asked her to complete a competitive state anxiety inventory, as well as a performance profile. We observed an improvement in self-confidence, state anxiety levels, and her ability to refocus after making errors. These improvements from the second interview to the third were greater than those from the first interview to the second. We believe that these improvements occurred because the intervention was more individualised to Sophie's needs and she was able to direct the intervention herself. She now has the tools to continue improving on her own.