Reducing Competitive Anxiety in Cheerleaders: A Psychological Approach

Background Information: Cheer leading is a growing, highly competitive, and potentially stressful sport, with 3.5 million athletes practicing worldwide. The sport presents many risks, as it was responsible for more catastrophic injuries among female high school and college athletes than any other sport between 1982 and 2016 in the U.S. In Canada, there were 1496 cheer leading injuries requiring hospitalization from 1990 to 2010. According to the Williams and Andersen stress model, athletes with certain personality dispositions (e.g. high competitive anxiety), fewer coping resources (e.g. social support, stress management) and an extensive history of life stressors are prone to appraising athletic situations as being stressful, resulting in an exaggerated stress response. The stress response is particularly likely to manifest itself during instances in which an athlete perceives a high demand to succeed, but feels they possess inadequate resources to do so. These situations often lead to a variety of symptoms, including poorer performance quality, generalized muscle tension (physiological), and heightened distractibility (attentional), culminating in a greater likelihood of injury among athletes. Objectives: The goal of this study will be to administer a psychological-based intervention to improve the stress-coping skills of competitive cheerleaders, acting to minimize their competitive anxiety, maintain their performance quality, and reduce their risk of injury during the span of a season. Hypothesis: Cheerleaders who complete a psychological-based stress-coping intervention will report lower competitive anxiety, demonstrate superior performance, and report less time lost from cheer leading due to injury compared to a control group of teammates receiving a placebo program. Theoretical Approach: The psychological intervention will be based on the Stress Inoculation Technique (SIT), with the objective of restructuring athletes' coping skills in order to improve their management of stress (i.e. competitive anxiety). During the first phase of SIT, athletes will bring up narrative accounts of stressful athletic situations, identifying previously insufficient coping techniques as well as potential coping strengths. Self-monitoring strategies will be introduced to help athletes become more aware of the ways that they inadvertently build up stress reactions. During the second SIT phase, athletes will be taught coping skills such as muscle relaxation, use of self-efficacy (confidence) statements, cognitive re-framing of stressful situations, and emotion regulation techniques, which they will then apply to their personal cheer leading experiences. These skills will be further rehearsed through positive mental imagery and practice to ensure their effectiveness. In the final SIT stage, athletes will be encouraged to apply their new coping skills to incrementally more demanding cheer leading situations while utilizing stress management techniques. Athletes will be further reminded to take credit for their improvement, instilling a lasting sense of self-efficacy. The SIT intervention will teach athletes an array of anxiety management skills in order to help them develop effective stress-coping strategies during important cheer leading events. Participants will maintain an in-person correspondence with the researcher throughout to ensure a properly personalized and collaborative intervention experience. Methods: The intervention period will reach from September 2019 to December 2019, as this is the busiest and most competitive part of the cheer leading season. Half of Western University's 30-40 athlete co-ed cheer leading team will be randomized to complete a six session "sport nutrition" program as a control, while the other half will be randomized to complete a six session bi-weekly SIT program. Since the intervention and control groups will come from the same team, all participants will share identical practice and competition schedules, ensuring each group is exposed to the same athletic situations. As such, differences in group outcomes will most likely be due to the type of intervention they received. To measure performance quality, total scoring deductions caused by the athletes in each group during Western's two runs at the 2019 PCA college cheer leading championship will be compared. Fewer deductions indicate fewer errors (bobbles, drops, falls, etc.) and reflect superior performance. Impact: The current study will be the first to develop and implement a psychological-based intervention tailored to cheerleaders with the goal of improving these athletes' stress-coping abilities. If successful, this intervention is highly scalable and can be used by athletes where stress and injury are salient features of their sport, and where individual performance is highly scrutinized.