Drugs, steroids, alcohol, marriage, divorce, death, illness, and image. Athletes from Dennis Rodman to Michael Irvin and Ricky Williams and their baggage that is carried along. Sounds pretty familiar right? Sounds like the life of the average breathing American. Now imagine putting a high risk career that can be terminated at any time with the rest of those stresses? This is the case of most collegiate and professional athletes. One of the hardest complications of being a successful athlete is dealing with the pressures of life outside of the gifted profession. Many outside of the athletic realm often claim that the actions performed by athletes are unacceptable and sometimes intolerable. But as athletes go through their different trials and tribulations, the media is the negatively based media that attempts to shred an athlete’s career. In an effort to clear the stereotypes of athletes, people must understand the conditions of performance pressure, gender differences, and thorough background knowledge. By the time this blog ends, I hope that various diverse audiences will be able to further examine the actions performed by athletes and understand more clearly.
As I said the daily life of an athlete can be some of the most difficult experiences to deal with. As most athletes can agree, one of the hardest to cope with is relationships. When young and single throughout the college years, it can be very difficult to stay faithful and focused. With the uprising fame and social burst, it is easy to lose focus. As the next level approaches, further temptations arise and pressure can surge from all angles. In addition, one must deal with the personal issues that never get exposed to the public.
Along with the external and physical abuse is the factor of the athletes own mental battle. The ability to facilitate family, work time, traveling, and other commitments properly is a job in own self. As most viewers are aware, many athletes are signed to various contracts that oblige them to appear to the public in a manor that may not even truthfully represent them at all. Once an athlete is caught acting outside of the normal perception of the media, the athletes reputation can be jeopardized by something that incorrect. These issues will also be down into racial categories, gender, and reputation.
Lastly, gender is also a significant issue that desperately need to be addressed. With the evolution of the change of women’s role in society, gender is also linked to sports. Women are now playing more sports that were once male dominated and becoming successful. With the anxiety of performing to prove their position in the sport, women also deal with pregnancy, personal attributes, and jus overall being a woman. Throughout this blog, my goal is for audiences to be able to carefully comprehend the adjustments that must be made by both male and female athletes.
The relevance between Gender & Athletic Psychology and this article named Athletes: The Stress of College Decisions is very prominent. The article is written by an individual named Meg that wrote about the difficulty of making a decision of what college to go to. This was an very serious issue for the author because it is the process she took in deciding the proper college to attend. The writer just began writing in May of this year so she does not have many comments on this articles but have posts on her other blogs. Her two most popular posts are politics and feminism in politics.
This blog is so pertinent because my own personal blog wants to explore the differences and complications behind gender and athletic psychology. In this article, the writer explores the difficulties that are attached with making the right choice academically and athletically at the collegiate level. Going through the process of actually choosing to play sports in college and excel both in school and sports is apart of the mental process of athletic psychology. Once deciding on the decision to whether further their careers in sports or school or move on to another profession is also a complication. There is a close connection between the college decision making and gender and athletic psychology.
Seeing that this is a personal account, the article is not exactly scholarly, academic, or professional. This is why the author took my attention. The blog contains complex situations that most may not realize. The writer wants to try and either tries to ease high school student’s pressure about college or raise awareness about the complications of deciding what the future holds. From this, many of her explanations are mostly personal so the posts are less detailed than most blogs describing athletes and psychology.
Overall, her audience is high school students that are aiming to attend college. She makes references to students that are not associated with athletics but her main audiences are those who are going into college with sports as a lever. She shows how those who are attending Division I or II colleges have scholarships and decision making may be a bit easier. When getting down to Division III, there are no scholarships and that’s the choice she made. If high school students are reading and posting replies to this blog, then the field will also be important for their general knowledge.
The article I have chosen can help my own personal blog by exploring the different obstacles before college. On one side, the pressures before college for some athletes are far more extreme than collegiate athletes. For example, male baseball athletes in high school have the opportunity to go the Major League directly from high school. Between college coaches, scouts, and family, the athlete may feel various amounts of stress. This is an area that can be researched and easily scribed. Conversely, I can use this personal account as an example of the differences between male and female athletes. Even as early as high school, the demand to perform at a certain level is required and sometimes expected from those around the athlete. With the daily distinctions between men and women, this field can be investigated in several ways.
When talking about athletes and the every day struggle to perform, stereotypes may be one of the most contributing factors. In the article, Stereotyping that Hurts, Stereotyping that Helps, John M. Grohol describes how stereotypes in everyday life may either help or hurt people in performance. Throughout his blog, Grohol takes several diverse approaches to express his opinion on the different effects of stereotyping. Grohol is very optimistic when trying to reverse the negative stereotypes in to more inspiring labels. Grohol quotes:
…research from the past few decades that shows when people are reminded of a negative stereotype that pertains to a group they identify with (e.g., race or gender), they do worse on a specific task than when a control group isn’t given the reminder. For instance, when women subjects were reminded that ‘women are no good at math,’ they did worse at a math task.
In doing this, Grohol is attempting to maintain a positive attitude towards the various negative views on certain groups. In athletic performance, there are also many similar stereotypes that athletes must encounter. Male athletes are expected to perform better than female athletes in all sports while females are also expected to be able to “keep up” with male athletes.
In addition, athletes must also face races separation that causes further stereotypes. In his blog, Grohol call this a “stereotype lift,” when someone uses a negative stereotype for self motivation. Again Grohol is trying to uphold his positive outlook when talking about the problems in negative stereotype. He gives the example of basketball players:
If an African-American is reminded that ‘white people can’t jump (e.g., in basketball),’ they’ll perform better.
