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