Shifting Paradigms
Examining Motivational Climate in Hawai’i College Tennis Athletes
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rong Ma
Motivation is one of the primary psychological skills in high performance tennis players; majority tennis players frequently confront losing in their athletic careers whether in the professional level or in the college level. Tennis players need motivation to be resilient, to train diligently and creatively after numerous frustrations or disappointments from the defeats. In addition, recent many sport psychological studies signify that competitive anxiety has a dreadful effect on tennis performance. It becomes clearer that many tennis players strive for enhancing their mental expertise to campaign the negative effect from competitive anxiety. International Tennis Federation indicates that various motivational perspectives will respectively influence the effect of competitive anxiety. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between motivational climate and the competitive anxiety among current collegiate tennis athletes in Hawaiʻi. 32 male and 2 female tennis players from different universities in Hawaiʻi participated in this research study. The result from the study shows that task-oriented goal motivation can efficiently mitigate the symptom of competitive anxiety, but ego-oriented goal motivation deteriorates the negative effect of competitive anxiety. Three measure instruments would use in this study are: The Sport Motivation Scale, Task-oriented and Ego-oriented Questionnaires, Sport Competitive Anxiety Scale The method of this study is Cross-Sectional and I will employ T-test to exam the variances from different questionnaires.
Inclusive Masculinities, Homosexuality and Homophobia in German Professional Soccer
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matthias Kaelberer
Inclusive Masculinities, Homosexuality and Homophobia in German Professional SoccerGerman society and even German soccer have become more acceptant of the idea of inclusive masculinities. Hyper-masculinity is no longer the only paradigm dominating discourses on soccer. Other forms of masculinities have become far more accepted in the German public and its soccer community. Nevertheless, two major aspects of homophobia remain part of the German soccer scene. First, homophobic epithets and chants remain very much part of the climate in the soccer stadiums. Second, there is the absence of openly homosexual top-level soccer players. So far, no active players in top division German soccer have come out as gay. What explains this contrast between the acceptance of inclusive masculinities and the continued homophobia of the game? This paper analyses discourses on masculinity, homosexuality and homophobia in German professional soccer to address this puzzle. I argue that the increasing commercialization of the game and the efforts of preserving the tradition of the game tend to pull in the same direction. Efforts of preserving the traditions of a “manly” game and the potential commercial “punishment” of openly gay players help in maintaining the dominance of traditional masculinity in the game.
Sport and Masculinity: Using Experiential Narratives to Redefine Social Infrastructures and Social Cohesion
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Scott A. Ellis
Sports teams are prevailing, defining elements of masculinity at university but represent a conflicted social continuum between acceptance and rejection. Despite the inimitable social value placed on sports by college-age men, there is significant evidence that associated social value is vapid and toxic. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, I investigated how male students conceptualised their relational experiences between mental health and sports. Regardless of their sexual identity, all of the participants described their experiences of masculine representation in negative terms. This included students who were part of fraternities and those who represented an institutional sports team. It was notable that the mainstream media representation of sports was cited as discordant with their beliefs. Instead, they recognised homogenous hyper-mediatised mainstream sports representation as highly problematic. Participants had a significant degree of insight into social spheres including the ‘coming out’ of several high-profile gay sportsmen. University-based sports teams have begun to recognise the negative impact a closed, exclusive community or team of hyper-masculinised men can have on team performance and wider relationships. While aspects of masculinity such as aggressive behaviour are salient in competitive sports, sports-based masculinity itself is an unstable conceptualisation that varies across situations and social context. Despite San Francisco hosting the world’s first gay-inclusive games in 1989, the US is still considered to be a hostile environment for LGBT sportspeople, with highly visible, overt homophobia. A 2015 international study of homophobia in sport, Out On The Fields, ranked the US as the most homophobic developed nation for competitive sports.
