"Concentration"A Deciding Factor In Winning(Part 2 )

To develop the psychological skill "concentration" to focus on the right thing at the right time depends on the development of an elite player from an early age.

With a conducive environment at all levels, where fun and excitement are emphasized, the concentration level of the young hockey players too will grow to a point where they will lose track of time and being unaware of fatigue; which is the biggest enemy of concentration.

From my observation, when a child is fully concentrating on an activity that gives fun and excitement, the child gets lost in it and spends literally hours on the activity and on the contrary when the child is not interested.

When the child is exposed to sports, the parents and coaches must understand that this is a period to encourage the child to experiment with different sports for pure pleasure.

The essence of the child's participation in sports during this early age must be to develop motor skills, positive identities, motivation, and belief about sports and physical activities.

Be patient, upon the child reach 13+, the child will choose one or two sports to specialize in, where the main focus will be on developing skills and strategies for competition.

During this specializing years, fun and excitement must still remain the central element in developing the young hockey players. This is to prevent young players from becoming disinterested and dropping out.

Young hockey players that blossom out from such an environment will have the concentration skill to develop other psychological skills with ease i.e anxiety control, mental preparation, team emphasis, use of imagery, planning and analysis and self- confidence

With excellent psychological skills in place, the young hockey players learning capacity will be infinite in the areas of tactics and technical skills.

At the elite level, the training is highly structured, which is mentally and physically demanding, and the coaches need to be innovative to keep the player's concentration on the game with new skills and challenges.

Let's fly to Australia, The World Hockey Champion.

What is their best-ranked mental strength?

In a study done by Groove & Hanrahan (1988) at the Australia Institute Of Sport(AIS) using the Self Analysis Of Mental Skills on 39 interstate and international level field hockey players, their best-ranked mental skill is "concentration".

Without any doubt, "concentration" is still the Australian hockey team-best ranked mental strength until today.



Thank You.