Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

ubiquitous phenomenon of excuse making in sport. Recently, Hodgkinson (2002)
assembled a collection of excuses used by athletes and coaches (see Box 1.2).

Box 1.2 Some classic excuses in sport can they be serious?

Athletes and coaches often make excuses to avoid taking personal responsibility for
errors, mistakes or missed opportunities in sport Recently, Hodgkinson (2002) presented
some classic excuses in this field Among them were:

• The suggestion that the grey colour of Manchester United’s shirts prevented team-mates
  from seeing and passing to each other properly (Alex Ferguson, manager of
  Manchester United, after his team’s 3–1 defeat by Southampton in 1996)


• The claim that “the balls were too bouncy” (Kenny Dalglish, then manager of
  Newcastle, after his team’s 1–1 draw with Stevenage in an FA Cup match in 1998)


• The explanation that England’s defeat by South Africa in 1999 in a cricket test match
  held in Johannesburg was due to low cloud” conditions

Having scratched the surface of the mental dimension of sport, let us now introduce the
discipline of sport and exercise psychology.

Sport and exercise psychology as an academic discipline

A common definition of sport psychology is that it is “a science in which the principles of
psychology are applied in a sport or exercise setting” (R.H.Cox, 2002, p. 5). Although
this definition may place excessive emphasis on the applied focus of the discipline, it
implies that empirical research on mental aspects of athletic performance is at least as old
as psychology itself. For example, in the nineteenth century, Triplett (1898) found that
racing cyclists tended to perform at least 25 per cent faster when competing against other
cyclists (or “pacemakers”) than when performing alone against the clock. This discovery
that individual athletic activity is facilitated by the presence of others became known as
“social facilitation” and was attributed to the capacity of rival performers to “liberate
latent energy not ordinarily available” (ibid., p. 532). Interestingly, Triplett’s research led
to a robust empirical principle in social psychology. Specifically, the presence of other
people tends to enhance the performance of well-learned skills but to impair the
performance of poorly learned skills (Cashmore, 2002).
Unfortunately, despite having a research tradition spanning more than a century (see
Brewer and Van Raalte, 2002; and McCullagh, 1995, for brief historical accounts), the
field of sport psychology is difficult to define precisely. This is so because of the twin-
track identity of the discipline (Feltz and Kontos, 2002). To explain, as we indicated in
the previous section, sport and exercise psychology is not only regarded as a sub-field of
mainstream psychology but also as one of the sport sciences. Indeed, Gill (2000)
classified sport and exercise psychology as a “branch of exercise and sport science” (p. 7)
rather than of psychology.

Introducing sport and exercise psychology: discipline and profession 13