Assessment of pre-competition emotional states of different mastery women-basketball players

Abstract

Purpose: Before competitions, athletes often have different emotions, tension, instability, mistakes and doubts. Thus, precompetition states have an important influence on the quality of athlete's performance, but it is important for athletes to control these states. For the optimum competition performance, the emotional states of athletes and their ability to control them properly must be considered. Purpose: to assess the pre-competition emotional states of different mastery women-basketball players. Material: For the assessment of pre-competition emotional states of women-basketball players, the competitive state anxiety inventory-2 as well as the SAN test were used and they helped to assess the pre-competition emotional states of women-basketball players: well-being, activity, mood. 171 women-basketball players that played in two different women's basketball league championships of Lithuania participated in the research. All the women-basketball players were divided into two groups: 71 women-basketball players played in the women's basketball league of Lithuania (in our case, their mastery was high) and 100 women-basketball players played in Akvile women's basketball league (athlete women of low mastery). In order to perform the descriptive index analysis, check the hypothesis and assess the reliability of the difference between the researched groups, Student (t) and chi-square (x2) criteria were applied. Statistical significance level alpha = 0.05. Results: The results of the research showed the women-basketball players playing in the women's basketball league of Lithuania assessed the cognitive anxiety with 24.8 +/- 9.29 points and the women-basketball players playing in Akvile basketball league assessed it with 13.9 +/- 3.85 points. Appropriate means of somatic anxiety indexes: 20.7 +/- 9.45 and 13.1 +/- 2.61 points. Meanwhile, the women-basketball players of lower mastery (30.7 +/- 4.85 points) had a higher self-confidence level than the women-basketball players of higher mastery (20.6 +/- 9.36 points). The women-basketball players of higher mastery assessed their pre-competition emotional states: well-being with 46.5 per cent and activity with 52.4 per cent and almost 40 per cent of the women-basketball players from the both groups assessed their mood at an average level. Conclusions: After assessing the pre-competition emotional states of the women-basketball players of different mastery, it was revealed that the women-basketball players of higher mastery had higher cognitive and somatic anxiety before competitions compared with the women-basketball players of lower mastery. Meanwhile, the women-basketball players playing in Akvile basketball league were more self-confident. The well-being and activity of the women-basketball players of lower mastery is assessed better than those of the women-basketball players of higher mastery, but there were no reliable differences of mood.