Archive for the 'Allenatori' Category
As often happens at the beginning of each school year, there is much discussion about the role of teachers, parents, new rules regarding smartphone use, and everything that doesn’t work well in our Italian school system. I’ve already written several blog posts on this topic.
When it comes to educating young people, we are well aware of how much sport can serve as a tool for growth and development if used in the best way. The question remains: who is responsible for training coaches and instructors? Graduates in sports science leave university with a significant body of psychological knowledge, but they haven’t developed the ability to apply it during their studies. The conflicts between CONI and Sport Salute have drastically reduced training opportunities and the number of courses. The remaining training activities are carried out by individual federations, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, hampered by numerous constraints that a National School of Sport used to overcome in terms of both the quality and quantity of training proposals, as well as the experience and expertise of the instructors. Additionally, it has been several years since the only Italian journal of sports science was last published, apparently due to these institutional issues.
It is also unthinkable that sports like soccer, volleyball, athletics, and swimming—just to name a few—have different training programs when the basic principles of an educational path aimed at young people are essentially similar, regardless of the specific sport involved.
It is interesting to note that in the most widely practiced sports, it is often the sports clubs themselves, which have an in-house psychologist, that provide on-field training support to their instructors and offer assistance to families and young athletes. This is common in tennis and youth soccer, as their respective federations formally require the inclusion of a psychologist within each club. In the tennis and padel federation, these psychologists must have qualified through a first-level mental coach course, open only to psychologists. In the soccer federation, the psychologist must have completed a master’s degree in sports psychology.
As is often the case in Italy, institutional shortcomings are directly overcome at the grassroots level by those who work directly with young people.
The writer Erri De Luca interprets elderly years as the age of experimentation. As soon as I heard this perspective, I found myself embracing an idea of life in these years that corresponds to my current way of living. We move forward into the unknown; our bodies are certainly no longer what they were when we were young, or even just in our fifties. They no longer respond as before, yet they still possess a strength and endurance that, just a few decades ago, would have been considered extraordinary, limited to a few exceptional human beings. Today, however, this is a common trait shared by many people. Therefore, being self-aware, knowing how to preserve oneself while also improving our intellectual, social, and physical abilities, must be seen as a daily goal—not as an attempt to preserve youth, which is, of course, no longer there.
Following this path means committing to the realization of a personal growth project that will continue as long as we have the capacity to pursue it. It is not a challenge with oneself, nor a race against time; for me, it is a way to continue giving meaning to daily life, which is filled with professional work, interpersonal relationships, and physical training. It means living each day in a way that leaves us satisfied with how we spend our time, continuing along this path toward the unknown. Because the obstacles that will inevitably arise tomorrow to limit this way of life are unforeseeable, and when they do appear, we will think about how to face them and move beyond them.
It’s similar to when fog descends in the mountains: you slow down so as not to lose your way, stop to look for the next reference point, and only then call out to your companion who stayed back at the last visible signpost. You reunite and continue in this way until the end of the trail. In everyday life, I try to proceed in the same manner—always moving forward but slowing down when necessary. Old age helps to maintain this approach, as physical and mental recovery is slower and must be respected if one wants to go far. So, let’s move forward joyfully into this new world of old age.
This year marks 30 years since I began working in clay shooting. It’s an important milestone that spans most of my professional life, and I’ve been able to reach it thanks to the trust of the organizations and athletes I’ve worked with, the curiosity I’ve shown towards these sports, and the perseverance and desire for improvement that have always guided me.
I was 39 years old when I was introduced by the federal doctor, Francesco Fazi, to President Luciano Rossi and the technical commissioners of the three disciplines (trap, skeet, and double trap). They decided to include me as a psychologist within the national teams. I must admit that I knew nothing about this sport, especially its psychological implications and the emotional states of the shooters during competitions. Certainly, it was easy to say that mistakes were caused by competitive stress, but how could I be of help to athletes who lost a competition by just one target, perhaps hitting 121 out of 125 when making it to the finals required hitting just one more? So how could we improve performance by that little bit (one more target), which made all the difference between a win and a loss?
That was the task I was given, and watching the first competitions, it wasn’t at all clear what the approach should be on each shooting station when a target was hit compared to when it was missed. The coaches helped me understand how the sport worked, and the shooters themselves began to share with me how they experienced the competitions, their thoughts and emotions, their internal dialogue at various moments before and during the competition, during breaks between rounds, and before making a mistake. I spent a lot of time with them, right up to the 2000 Olympics in Australia, attending the European Championships, World Championships, and training camps every year. Meanwhile, in 1998, I also started working with the shooters of the Fiamme Oro, coached by Pierluigi Pescosolido, with whom I worked weekly until the London Olympics in 2012.
The work I did with the Italian shooters, among the best in the world, gave me the opportunity to start working at the international level. This opportunity was provided by Marcello Dradi, who contacted me to provide consultancy to Indian and Iranian shooters, for whom he was the coach. It was a collaboration that opened me up to different worlds and mentalities, and it continued with Dradi as a consultant for the Chinese national trap team until the beginning of COVID, when it obviously came to an end. In those same years, I also prepared James Galea, an established Maltese doctor, who was motivated to become a professional shooter. We worked together intensively for several years, and thanks to him, I was offered a psychological consultancy for the Maltese national team in the year leading up to the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
In recent years, my involvement with the world of clay shooting has decreased, but this year I spent a week in Taiwan conducting a theoretical and practical course on psychological training in clay shooting and target shooting. In the practical part, I worked with their national athletes, and one of them, shooter Lee Meng Yuan, won the bronze medal in skeet at his Olympic debut. I hope I was helpful to him, even if just by 0.1 percent.
Families are often faced with the decision of which sport their children should practice, and the media has recently been offering advice on this topic. There is ongoing debate about whether it is better for a child who is considered shy to engage in a team sport or an individual contact sport. Which option is best for encouraging socialization or building confidence, and so on?
People tend to forget that it would be better for children to practice multiple sports instead of just one, or that any sport is practiced in a group where each participant must collaborate. Usually, no one explains this to parents, who remain caught in the web of single-sport clubs that compete for their attention.
I also understand that a soccer school, a swimming club, or any other sports organization must pursue its own goals, which are to recruit as many members as possible to participate in a specific sport. In Italy, there is no solution to this issue with sports, so this model will continue.
However, there is an important role that parents can play, and they can do so entirely on their own. It concerns the free time that children have outside of school and their two sports practices. What do they do in this free time? Do they move, play with others, go to the park, or something else? Or do they stay at home alone, playing on the PlayStation or smartphone?
This time is extremely important for them to organize games and activities with their peers and learn to feel self-determined and progressively more autonomous. I would say this is a significant role that families can play, even while having fun with their children and fulfilling their educational role.
At the beginning of the new school and sports year, the discussion around the education of young people resumes, focusing on how to address the now well-established increase in cases of discomfort, which has culminated in a repetitive and consolidated rise in depression and anxiety over the years, not to mention news stories that frighten and leave adults feeling powerless.
To demonstrate that this reality is not a phenomenon limited to Italy or any specific nation, surveys have been conducted across various continents on topics such as “I feel lonely at school,” “I feel left out at school,” or “I easily make friends at school.” It has emerged that since 2012, the perception of not having friends and feeling lonely has increased almost everywhere.
This has led to a decrease in the ability to stay focused on the present, to remain connected with one’s social environment and people, and, above all, to a distorted self-perception dominated by the distortions created through social media, which are experienced as reality. Many companies are aware of these problems, including Dove, which launched the #NoDigitalDistortion campaign aimed at boosting young girls’ self-esteem and promoting a positive body image on social media. Another example is the Body Confident Sport program, a body confidence campaign in collaboration with Nike, designed to enhance the body confidence of girls who play sports.
An alliance between families, schools, and sports organizations is needed to teach individuals to cultivate passion and interest in the activities they engage in.
This would not be intended to create a system of prohibitions but rather to stimulate the three main motivations that support growth: free play, adaptation, and social learning.
Childhood should be grounded in play, as is the case for all mammals. It is the period in which learning occurs through emotionally significant experiences. These activities are unsupervised by adults, where self-control is learned, and conflicts are resolved. They are activities that are enjoyed and freely chosen, not carried out to achieve pre-set goals. Physical play, outdoors, where some level of risk is involved, and with children of varying ages, is the most natural way of playing. Too often, when parents, teachers, or coaches intervene, play becomes less free, less enjoyable, and produces fewer benefits. Regarding sports during childhood, the issue is not the hours spent in training but how the rest of the time is spent, during which there is often no opportunity for free play.
The second motivational aspect reminds us that from the very beginning of life, children are engaged in a continuous emotional exchange with their social environment, which initially should be represented by the parents. Thus, growth occurs through the development of interpersonal relationships with an increasingly broader range of people, involving direct face-to-face contact, physical and motor interactions, and the typical ways of each culture. The world of social media moves in the opposite direction, distancing people from these relationships and offering others that are falsely realistic, but this social media world is rapidly growing.
The third aspect of human development is social learning. This does not concern academic learning but rather the activation of the desire to learn through imitation and having certain individuals as role models. Initially, children will imitate their parents, but they will then broaden their choices to include other people.
I am often asked why people become so passionate about the achievements of sports teams and individual athletes. First of all, I want to point out that sportsman or sportswoman, as they used to be called years ago regardless of the sport, have always sparked strong passions. Just think of the many experiences such as the duels between Coppi and Bartali, or Gimondi and Merckx, the matches of the great Torino, and the debates about Mazzola and Rivera.
Top-level sport is made up of events—competitions—where the best athletes battle it out and distinguish themselves from others through the quality of their performances. I believe this is what captivates people: seeing excellence emerge, thanks to both personal and team qualities. If you think about it, these are among the few human performances where, in a short and defined time—the duration of the competition—you can witness truly unique achievements, such as world records. We see these performances as they happen; the only other examples with similar characteristics might be theatrical performances and live musical performances.
Sport reminds us of the importance of experiencing positive emotions that help us feel good. Daily life is often stingy in providing us with these feelings, so athletes’ performances come to meet this need, offering us moments of well-being, often shared with those close to us, like family and friends.
Exciting weeks of sports, from the Olympics to the Paralympics, where we witnessed athletes willing to make any sacrifice to achieve their goals—from Tamberi, who sustained himself with just a glass of water, to Palmisano, who competed despite having COVID, to the Paralympic athletes who show that any performance is achievable regardless of one’s starting condition. It’s somewhat the essence of the saying, “whether you’re a gazelle or a lion, start running.”
It’s the same thing that happens on the first day back at work after vacation: even if you don’t feel like it, start working. With this mindset, the first day is coming to an end; the important thing is to get started again. There will be time for enthusiasm; you can’t expect to have it on the first day. It’s better not to overthink it and just get back to it. At a certain point, habit will take over again, you’ll regain interest in what you’re doing, and unexpected events will happen that will elevate your emotional threshold, allowing you to pick up where you left off.
Let’s still enjoy these early days and even our reluctance to act because when everything starts moving at the usual pace again, we’ll miss these initial moments of boredom.
Hägglund, K., Wagstaff, C. R. D., Kenttä, G., & Thelwell, R. (2023). Starting a Conversation about Vulnerability in Elite Sport. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 15(1), 19–29.
Psychological strengths are idealized in elite sport and contribute to the presence of stigma surrounding mental health issues and a high threshold for help-seeking behavior. Recently, scholars have argued that the concept of vulnerability has the potential to challenge the dominance of the performance narrative in sport.
In this article, we provide practitioners with innovative poem and word cloud resources based on insights from high-performance coaches to enable conversations about vulnerability in sport.
We hope practitioners will use these resources to stimulate reflection and dialogue about vulnerability, which may lower thresholds for help-seeking and foster sustainability in sport organizations.
