I grew up playing tennis, my whole family played. My mother was a professional tennis player and my father coached on the tour. When my brothers and I started, it was just a fun activity that we could all do together but over time it became more and more of our daily lives. And as time went on, tennis supplied more and more of my opportunities in life. Both my brothers and I got scholarships to play at a Division I college tennis program at a distinguished university with the opportunity to earn a prestigious degree. I am interested in researching the mental side of competition and sports and how important the mind can be as well as its effect on performance. I would like to specifically research the methods of mental preparation that professional athletes use and have opened up on within professional tennis as well as other sports such as basketball, soccer, swimming, gymnastics and other olympic sports. So many things go into performance and competition that people do not understand. It is more than just perfecting a skill, some people excel in competitive atmospheres while others crumble under the pressure. I have always been interested in this, especially witnessing this different level of performance from teammates in my college career. Over the past five years, I have had a lot of teammates and it is interesting to see how some compete really well in practice matches but would have trouble competing in real matches while others did not compete as well in practice but peaked in real matches. For unit of analysis, I was thinking of comparing results with mental preparations taken by professional athletes and hope to find a correlation between mental preparation and results. As well, compare to college athletes to identify possible barriers that stand in the way of college athletes pursuing their professional aspirations. Because this topic is so close to home and because I am hoping to create a career in college coaching, this topic would be very relevant and helpful in my career pursuits.
This is a compelling and timely topic. Naomi Osaka’s decision to withdraw from tournaments in response to mental health concerns brings this issue into the open. For this topic, I think determining scope will be vitally important. Do you want to focus on a specific team, or even specific individuals, in your study? I believe your unit of analysis will be individuals within the realm of competitive athletics, meaning you’ll be studying individuals and their responses to the stresses of tournament competition. I expect a good bit of work has been done in this field, but it may not have been applied to D1 collegiate athletes or to collegiate tennis. But I think you’ll be able to find similar studies that will provide you guidance and direction in how to develop a study to measure the influence of mental “toughness” in sports. I think you’ll need to be careful in developing strong, limited research questions that will help you narrow the scope of your study.