Explain the role of Motivation in enhancing a sports performance.

AS and A Level Physical Education (Sport & Coaching)

Motivation is crucial to success in every sports event whether it be football, hockey or tennis. When not motivated a player is liable to make more mistakes and not perform at their best. A motivated player will overcome a demotivated performer almost every time. Motivation can be sparked by a number of different things including receiving encouragement, or even being insulted or put down. If an elite performer receives bad press over a particularly bad game, he or she may feel motivated to try and prove to everybody and themselves that they are capable of performing well. Sometimes a desire to win can be enough motivation to increase an athlete’s performance. “When I have entered the last round of the javelin knowing that I am lying out of the medal placing and in need of a big throw, the sense of impending doom has sometimes been enough to stimulate adrenaline to a level that has produced a performance better then my previous attempts.” (Backley)

Motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic factors are ones, which come from within the player such as enjoying playing the sport. Extrinsic factors are ones, which come from outside the player, such as money or receiving trophies.

Although there are many examples of sparks of motivation, I think the biggest factor that sparks motivation is simply having fun. When having fun a performer’s motivation will increase simply because they are enjoying themselves. As a result of this their performance will also improve. In theory of course most people that play sport do so because they enjoy playing it. Therefore the player must have some degree of motivation in order to want to play the sport in the first place. An example of this can be seen in football. Players continue to perform well even after they have accumulated large amounts of money and contract deals paying them thousands of pounds every week.

Setting goals will enable players to motivate themselves. There are three types of goals that players can set including secure, realistic and barrier breaking. Secure goals are ones, which a player will always achieve. Realistic goals are ones, which a player might achieve relatively easily and barrier breaking goals are goals, which the player will find difficult to achieve. If a player manages to break a goal the player will be more motivated. However it is crucial that the player does not set lots of difficult goals because if the player fails to achieve them, the result will be demotivation.

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Training is also a factor, which can increase or decrease a player’s level of motivation. Training improves a player’s fitness and overall health. Therefore training will improve a player’s self image and a player’s attitude. This means that more training that is successful will improve a player’s motivation. Training must not be boring and must contain a lot of variety in order to help motivate the players.

The atmosphere of a particular situation can affect somebody’s motivation. An example of this would be the FA cup final. Simply the cheering of the crowd and the knowledge that a win would result in the FA cup can motivate an entire team. This motivation will obviously encourage the team to do better. This is part of the reason why FA Cup finals are often substantially better then a simple friendly game of football. Another example would be when playing international games for your own country. The sense of actually wanting to do well for your country provides players with the motivation, which allows them to perform better.

Emotion is another important factor in motivating players. Simple emotions such as love, hate, hope and fear can be enough to spur a player on to perform better.

Arousal can also help or hinder players of sport. Players can be both over-aroused and under-aroused. Both can lead to a decline in performance. Motivation can affect a player’s level of arousal and if a player is aroused to an optimum level performance will be greatly increased. Over arousal or stress affects our ability to make decisions decreases. We rush decisions and perhaps tend to make the wrong decisions more often. Obviously this will affect our performance negatively. Under arousal and little motivation leads to a negative performance because of a lack of effort. A player will lose concentration and will generally become careless and more likely to make incorrect decisions, as they are not concerned with the outcome. Hull (1943) suggested that arousal and performance are directly proportional. When arousal increases so does performance. This is known as the drive theory. The inverted U theory, developed by Yerkes and Dodson (1908) suggests that arousal and performance can increase together up to an optimum point when past will decrease performance. Participants in sport can become anxious if over aroused and their performance will decrease.

Feedback is essential in helping a player to develop motivation. Knowledge of performance and results can help the motivation of a player but if used incorrectly they can also lead to demotivation. External and internal feedback can be used to increase motivation but different players respond differently to different types of feedback.

Cratty suggests that some factors that motivate us into playing sport include things like a desire to achieve a sense of mastery, a wish for status, friendship or a need to be challenged or to have excitement. A player wants to perform their best for personal satisfaction and happiness and in order to be entirely successful a player must have an element of self-motivation. Without it a player will lack the effort and will to perform well.

If a player is well motivated the coach will be able to concentrate on improving his or her technique rather then concentrating on improving the player’s motivation. Therefore a player with higher motivation will have an increased performance due to an increased amount of time spent on their technique.

Motives and needs of players are guided by the hope of success and the fear of failure. The hope of success plays a major role in motivating players. Every player has some sort of dream, only a few will achieve this dream. Players who succeed will see obstacles as a challenge and every time they fail they will put in more effort in order to improve and overcome these problems. This type of player would be intrinsically motivated. Other players while may be technically good enough to succeed, fail because of a lack of self-belief and willingness to spend the necessary time preparing physically and mentally. As Bill Besick (sports psychologist for Manchester United) says, “the strongest motivation must be because the player wants to win and in a team sport the motivation must be because the players want to win together.”