Weekly Reflection 1 5/15/22

This week was the first week of my deep dive into Sports Psychology. This week I learned a lot about some of my fellow student athletes through interviewing them about their experiences with the mental side of sports as well as some of their tendencies during a game. We also discussed some of the strategies we use and I heard some new ones that I researched like breathing to increase heart rate before a shift. One other strategy I heard many times was visualization, and using visualization to imagine exactly what you want to do. Using these strategies, many kids expressed that they performed much better compared to just trying to play without doing these things. Another thing I focused on was the idea of composure, as I mentioned in a daily blog, multiple different kids mentioned the word composure in our interview and I spent a while diving into this word and its meaning to sports psychology and sports as a whole. I loved what I did this week and I am really glad this is what the project turned into. It was not exactly what I planned but in the end it worked out perfectly and allowed me to split up my project into athletic interviews week one and professional interviews in week two. This week everything went as expected besides the day I could not do work due to taking too long at the phone store. I will benefit from this week as it helped me get into the interview process before the interviews that matter. It showed me what I need to improve on and what questions to cut out and what questions I need to add when talking to a professional. What I did this week helped me meet my goal of developing a deeper understanding of sports psychology through interviews and research and allowed me to build a general idea of the huge differences between each sport as well as the difference between each kid in that respective sport. This week showed me exactly why I chose this to be my senior project as well as a potential major in college. I loved hearing kids' opinions and stories on the mental side of sports and I can't wait to talk to some people who do this as a career, and who even have PHD’s in their studies.

Total Hours so far: 28 hours