Self Helpbook – Answers to some of your questions are given by Dr. Cristina Versari, our Sport Psychology Editor

Through the internet you can access some great sport research. One of the great things about using the web to access information is that you will almost always be given the opportunity to direct specific feed back to someone involved with the site you have selected. Frequently, these contacts will be experts and professionals with whom you would have little chance of communicating with, outside the internet environment. Plus, your chances of getting a quick and personalized response from those you contact are improved because of the comparative ease with which email messages can be sent.

One caveat, make sure to read all the information that’s available at any one particular site first. Your chances of getting a useful response will be much greater if you ask questions for which the answers have not already been given. Following are a few of the resources and information available to athletes on the internet.

Sport Research Articles:

In 1989, Dr. Nideffer published an article in The Sport Psychologist titled Psychological Services for the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Team (Nideffer,1989). You might have read that article. If you did, and if you had a question, you had no place to go. To get in touch with Dr. Nideffer would have taken a great deal of effort, contacting the publisher, etc. That article, however is also available on the world wide web:

At http://www.enhanced-performance.com/nideffer/article6.html you can find an article by Dr. Nideffer titled “Psychological Services for the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Team.”
Our very own “Self-help and Psychology Magazine” regularly carries articles of interest to coaches and athletes in this Sport Psychology Department. By opening the files for the other articles listed in this department. You will find information on gender issues in sport, how to use sport psychology and even an interview with an olympic gold medalist. Answers to some of your questions are given by Dr. Cristina Versari, our Sport Psychology Editor.
Information on how the concepts from the martial arts relate to the breathing and centering and arousal control can be found at:http://www.aikiweb.com/ A tremendous amount of material including pictures, articles, and books canalso be found at that site.
To examine your concentration skills go to: http://www.enhanced-performance.com/nideffer/TAISsport.html There is a questionnaire that will help you do that. You can copy this demonstration program from the web site to your computer. The program will help you begin to identify your concentration skills and provide you with some suggestions for improving those skills.
By typing in the address: http://www.usatoday.com/, you can not only read the USA Today sports page (for free), you can watch it get updated while you are reading.
CBS Sports is located at: http://www.cbs.com/sports. Once you are connected you can find out what sports programs are on for the week, you can email questions to the CBS Sports Show, and you can even see video highlights of big events like the 1996 Fiesta Bowl.
Interested in womens sports? Go to: http://fiat.gslis.utexas.edu/~lewisa/womsprt.html, Once there, you can read articles on gender and equality issues. You can connect with fan clubs like Gabriela Sabatini’s, or Katarina Witt. There you can ask questions, get pictures, and read stories.
Want to know how the field hockey team at the University of Connecticut did this week, or how the University of Tennessee did in basketball? A click of the mouse will tell you. You can check out the sports and colleges of your choice before you enroll.Want up to the minute information about sports around the world? Go to the Sports Line at: http://www.sportsline.com
No Golf enthusiast should miss The 19th Hole located at: http://www.sport.net/golf/

Sports on the internet can go beyond sport research. Imagine you’re a baseball pitcher and you’re walking back out onto the mound to pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning. You’re playing a game in New York and we’ve been watching on TV back in San Diego. We noticed that in the eighth inning you began to tighten up and started guiding the ball.

We send you an email telling you to remember what we talked about, reminding you to take a deep breath, exhale slowly and say to yourself “I’m in control,” just before you go into your windup. You turn on your portable computer in the dugout, read my message and smile. You go back out and strike out the side.

The examples we have provided help to illustrate the types of information that can be transferred from the experts to you, in a matter of seconds. Without getting on the internet, however, you won’t know what you are missing.

Nideffer, R.M. (1989). Psychological services for the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Team. The Sport Psychologist, 3, 350-357.
About the Author:

Robert Nideffer, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized sport psychologist. He is the CEO and Founder of Enhanced Performance Systems (EPS) and lives in San Diego.

Marc-Simon ‘Chip’ Sagal received his masters degree in Sport Psychology from San Diego State and works at EPS with Dr. Nideffer.идеальная бровьorenburg.v-stroim