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COPING STRATEGIES IN WOMEN'S SOCCER ATHLETES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

High-performance athletes suffer a series of psychological disorders that can harm their overall performance. With the high levels of competitiveness and physical/tactical training that are required today, coping strategies to overcome these psychological disorders can make the difference between a winning team and a losing team.

Objective:

To compare coping strategies among high-performance athletes and amateur women's soccer players.

Methods:

This is a quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional, non-probability study. The sample consisted of 56 athletes, divided into two groups: G1 - high-performance athletes and G2 - amateur women's soccer players. The instrument used was the Athletic Coping Skills Inventory-28 (ACSI - 28), validated for Brazil (ACSI - 25BR) and a demographic questionnaire containing 12 questions, developed by the authors themselves. For the data analysis, descriptive statistics, the Shapiro- Wilk test and the Student t test for independent data were used. A confidence level of 95% was adopted.

Results:

The high performance athletes had higher average scores, which were statistically significant, comparing to the amateur athletes, in the dimensions: "performance under pressure" (p=0.048), "concentration" (p=0.020) and "confidence/motivation" (p=0.009).

Conclusion:

The high performance athletes performed better in all dimensions except for "trainability" and "freedom from worry", when compared to the amateur athletes.

Keywords:
athletes; soccer; adaptation, psychological

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