BDO Junior World Cup

I spent the last month in a flurry of excitement, serving as the ambassador to Germany for the BDO Junior World Cup Field Hockey Tournament, housed at Boston University, Harvard University, and Boston College. The tournament featured the best Junior Field Hockey teams from around the world in a remarkable display of athleticism, sports-person-ship, and competition. While watching the tournament, I couldn’t help but wonder how challenging it would be to compete in a foreign country for 2 weeks, especially if the language spoken differed from athletes’ native languages. Not only must athletes compete against strong opponents, they must navigate a new city, be aware of cultural differences, and adjust their training, sleeping, and eating schedules to fit with their competition schedules in a different country. While many teams traveled with sport psychologists, some teams were left to cope with mental stressors in the confines of their own heads or the dorm rooms they shared with their teammates.

Typically, the more significant the event, the more pronounced mental stress is for athletes. Often, the symptoms of such stress rear their ugly heads when athletes perceive situational demands to exceed their personal resources at any given time. Such stress can be managed through setting realistic expectations, visualization or imagery, positive self talk, and a variety of other techniques provided generously by the field of sport psychology.