Mental Toughness And Collegiate Basketball Performance Analysis

This essay will explore how Mental toughness and Goal setting affects collegiate basketball performance. Mental Toughness (MT) has been defined as the psychological skill that helps coping with sporting pressures, the ability to persist and ‘hang in there’ (Crust, 2007). Another definition for MT is also explained by Crust (2007) as the psychological determination and positive coping in the face of demands of the sporting context. Goal Setting can be described as task performance and is directly regulated by the conscious goals that individuals strive towards on a task (Locke and Latham, 2002). Firstly this essay will describe what mental toughness is, why it is vital when competing in basketball at collegiate level and its effect on the performance

Gender and Starting Status. The study consisted of 197 male and female participants who completed the Psychological Performance Inventory Alternative. This is a measure of the characteristics and skills associated with MT and also an objective measurement of basketball performance in terms of point percentage, rebounds, assists, steals, turnovers and personal fouls (Finch, 2013). Results showed that the change in basketball performance can be partially predicted by MT and starting status (Newland, 2013). However starters and non-starters did not differ in MT (Finch, 2013). Moderated Hierarchical Analysis indicated that MT is associated with performance for male and female players where the starter status was most the crucial factor in the overall performance (Podlog, 2013). Based on this investigation PPIA is one of the ways of measuring MT and when developing a framework of MT (Harbke, 2013). On the other hand, there is no validated measure of MT so the qualitative methods are preferable (Madrigal,

The Swain (2013)’s study looked at these different aspects in collegiate basketball performance. The study looking at the impact of goal-setting programs on chosen components of basketball performance over a competitive season in four college basketball players using the Multiple Baseline Single Subject A-B-A design (Jones, 2013). This design was used to observe different performance components such as the following: turnovers and rebounds during the first eight games of the season. During the midseason break, the players were chosen based on one aspect of the individual’s play that would benefit from improvement (Jones, 2013). The goal-setting program was designed based on a goal-attainment scaling procedure; this procedure consisted of the following: where subjects generated numerical targets for their chosen components and performance components which were then assessed in the next 8 games during pre-intervention phase (Swain, 2013). After the intervention stage of the study, 3 out of 4 subjects showed continuous improvements in the targeted areas of performance. The results showed that there were no outcome changes in the performance components that were not targeted by subjects.