2026-05-05T15:27:50.769Z http://ezaposleni.singidunum.ac.rs/rest/sciNaucniRezultati/oai

ezaposleni.singidunum.ac.rs/rest/sciNaucniRezultati/oai:1:5047 2017-04-28T16:02:25Z 1

The realationship between athletic coping skills and sports confidence 2010 http://ezaposleni.singidunum.ac.rs/rest/sciNaucniRezultati/oai/record/1/5047 J. Ilić LJ. Bačanac S. Mazić Introduction: Self–confidence is one of most important factors which influence on sports performance. Vealey (1986) defined sports confidence as believes or degree of certainty that individuals possess about their ability to be successful in sport. Unlike unidimensional operationalizations of sport confidence, Vealey & Knigh (2002) developed new theory of sport confidence as multidimensional construct and a new multidimensional instrument. Vealey identified nine relevant sources of athletes sports confidence (Vealey et al., 1998) and study shown that top five sources of confidence were: physical/mental preparation, social support, mastery, demonstration of ability, and physical self-presentation. Previousluy conducted research on Serbian athletes (Bacanac, Lj., Lazarevic, Lj., 1977) revealed that sports confidence has been dependent on gender, age, sports experience and general self-esteem of athletes. Aim and methods: Athletes feeling of physically and mentally preparation and optimal focus at their performance depends of developmental level of their psychological coping skills. So, we wanted to examine relationship between athletes sports confidence and coping skills. We wanted to find out which one of seven psychological skills has the greatest cotribution and prediction of athletes degree of confidence in their ability to be successful in sport. We used Sport Confindence Inventory SCI (Vealey and Knight, 2002) to measure three dimensions of sports confidence: Physical skills & training; Cognitive efficiency and Resilience. For measuring coping skills which are prerequisite of good mental preparation, we used Athletic Coping Skills Inventory ACSI (Smith et al. 1994) with seven subscales: Coping with adversity, Peaking under pressure, Goal setting/mental preparation, Concentration, Freedom from worry, Confidence and achievement motivation and Coachability. Results and discussion: Results obtained on sample of 256 serbian athletes from 19 different sports (185 males and 71 females, average age of 17.4 and average sports experience of 9 years), confirmed that total level of athletes coping skills explained 41% variance their general sports confidence (partial correlation coefficient: 0.63). The next psychological skill with significant single contribution to athletes sports confidence was their ability to coping with adversity (partial correlation coefficient: 0.14). Conclusions: The results confirmed our expectations that athletes psychological coping skills represents relevant source of their sports confidence. So, coaches and sports psychologists must pay more attention on development and improvement athletes psyhological coping skills and technics for mental preparation in order to enhansment their sports confidence and, consequently, their sports performance. Key words: Athletes, psychological coping skills, sports confidence. conferenceObject 150 151 Program and Book of Abstracts