http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/dec/20/classic-youtube-best-clips-2012
Monthly Archive for December, 2012
Page 2 of 4
knowledge + skill + attitude = competence
what you know + what you know to do + how you are while you are doing
=
to know how to do adapting yourself to the context, rules, opponents and referee
- Technical competence
- Autonomous in the assessment process
- Be accepted
- be physically fit
- Anticipation of the match actions
Starting from these dimensions it becomes important that the referee includes in his coaching program also the mental coaching, in order to maintain the controll of his stress during the match. Referees have to practice in this way since the beginning of their careers.
Have the “right” attitude means being totally focused only on what should be done to provide the best performance of which we are able. Just before the start of the competition and during its course, the athlete should be focused on making at the best her work. The training and the past performances must should be taught to manage the distractions, in order to react to them almost unconsciously. In those moments every kind of thinking is immediately classified as useful or useless to do well. The first is maintained and allows to remain focused on performance, while the latter must be eliminated. In this way the athlete is in control of his performance, he lives only in the present and is able to respond quickly to what happens in the competition.
Say that in sport the competence shown in the field is the key to have success, iy cannot be just a phrase on which we all agree. Should also be a topic of discussion, because I am convinced that each person gives a particular meaning to the term “competence” and that this is the cause of many mistakes that are made in the training of athletes. We must therefore agree on the meaning of competence. For many, the competence is synonymous of skill and then perform a specific skill means to know how to do the technical gesture or a set of technical actions. For example in golf means that in field practice the golfe ris able to send the ball to 150m in the correct way and is able to repeat this action for a number of times in an effective way. The same goes for team games, so the player gets and passes the ball to a teammate. Every athlete has acquired many of these skills during his daily training. But something is still missing because the ability will translate into competence. This additional aspect is the attitude of the athlete in the field. Attitude is the way in which a person shows himself, it is the behavior adopted by a person or a group in a given circumstance or with respect to other persons or groups or even with respect to events and problems.
“There are some professions where women aren’t just underrepresented and underpaid. They are completely shut out. That’s how it is with our national pastime- baseball, particularly Major League Baseball and its minor league affiliates. As I type this, in the year 2012, there are precisely zero women playing major league baseball. There are zero women coaching major league baseball, or managing or serving as general managers. Even in the “official” minor leagues, among the thousands and thousands of players from Triple-A to “Rookie Ball”, it’s easy to count the number of female players: that number is Zero. No woman has even been signed to a major-league affiliated minor league team since 1952, when Major League Baseball banned all teams from signing female players.
It seems astonishing that in the year 2012, as we find women heading several Fortune 500 companies and holding some of the most powerful positions in government, that a major employer (major league baseball) would ban individuals from obtaining jobs because of their gender. Honestly, the ban is almost certainly unenforceable because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based on “sex” for employers with more than 15 employees, but it is unclear whether the ban has ever been overturned.
Regardless of whether this deplorable ban has been “officially” overturned, the effect remains the same: there are no women playing baseball in the established major leagues and their farm systems.
Women who dream of someday leading the Clubs to a world series victory must instead look to the independent leagues, where they will make less money, receive less press coverage, and have even less chance of obtaining their big league goals.
But that hasn’t stopped Eri Yoshida, who now plays for the North American Baseball League’s Na Koa Ikaika Maui, based in Maui, Hawaii. Yoshida is a 5-2, 20 year old knuckleball throwing sensation, and as of today, is the only women playing professional baseball in an otherwise all-male baseball league. After a 2009 debut in Japanese independent leagues (at age 17), she burst on the scene in 2010 with the Golden Baseball League’s Chico Outlaws. While she struggled with her control in 2010, in 2011 she altered her delivery from “sidearm” to “three-quarters” and her control significantly improved. Moving to Na Koa Ikaika Maui in 2011, she became the first woman in 13 years to win a game in an otherwise all-male league. This year, she is back with Na Koa Ikaika Maui and pitching even better: last night, she got the win, going almost 8 innings, while giving up only 2 runs and 4 hits. To learn more about Eri Yoshida, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/… ”
(By Susan Gardner per www.dailykos.com/…/-Eri-Yoshida)
Once again, the football will not forgive the coaches and regularly after some lost games they are fired. We always say that it happens because it is easier to fire a coach than 11 players and the team owners do not accept the defeats. Thinking in this way the coaches are always victims and the others are their executioners. For once, I would like to try to think that the results of the teams reflect the limits of the coaches and that these exemptions should be experienced as alarm bells for a way to be a leader, that was wrong and therefore should be understood, evaluated and changed to be more prepared when there will be the next opportunity to sit on the bench. I do not know if these coaches do this critical track and eventually if they do it with the help of a consultant in the field of performance improvement. My impression is that this way of doing things does not belong to the world of football coaches, for the reason that if they do not feel the need for a consultant psychologist when they lead the team why should they feel the need when they are without a club.
The problem of the Napoli football team, as shown in the game lost yesterday against Bologna, is the attitude during the match. It’s something that in my opinion is untrained, because it is assumed that they have the skills to play it well enough to put the players in a position to be able to do in the field. My idea is different. In fact, the competence in play as we know depends on the integration of two components, which are the skills acquired and the attitude (how to behave in the field). In essence, it is not enough to be skilled, the players must know how to show it in the game, improving the attitude Napoli will continue to play well but it will also do it in the face of opponents.
The last athlete that we have come to know that she suffered from depression is the champion of skiing LindseyVonn (see interview on http://www.people.com/people/article/0,, 20,655,760.00. Html) after Buffon, Thorpe and many others. We are a long way from the 80s when psychologists wrote that sports champions show complex and well balanced personality . It was not true! For a long time it was thought that successful people and not just athletes but also coaches, great leaders, managers, the winners compared to losers showed common personality traits and therefore their identification in young people, it would be allowed to select potential champions from the others. No research has ever been able to prove. On the other hand, just think at the stars we all know to understand the great differences in personality: Tomba and Thoeni, Maradona and Platini, Rivera and Meroni, Messi and Balotelli, to name just a few. It happens to be successful and depressed, even being constantly under the eye of the public rather than the duty/want to keep winning create additional psychological pressures, increasing the conflict between that part of herself that is suffering from the pain of living and the other one who needs to do the best.
I attended a session of training of a young tennis player based on the research of sensations related to the optimum of her service. It was an intense workout where the focus on correct execution, feelings and execution has been stressed in a contemporary way, to lead to an improvement of this tennis fundamental. Overall, it was a session in which the mental component and the technique have been engaged in a consistent manner.
A first effect of this type of exercise resides in making aware the tennis player of the sensations related to the wrong movement and the correct one. The coach never said the athlete: “Do this because it’s better.” On the contrary, he led to try both ways and to assess which determined the best service. The development of a consciousness different from the one he had up to that time was the main theme of this training. The tennis player was able to develop a personal idea on what movement was better, convincing herself according to the result obtained.
It ‘s evident that in this way the storage of the new elements of the technical behavior was much deeper because it has been based not on the coach’s instructions but on the realization that the behavior suggested it was more advantageous. Trainings of this type demonstrate the importance of enhancing the mental processes of young athletes, using the physical sensations they feel in doing in one way rather than another, and subsequently, evaluation by the tennis effectiveness of the shot.
