INTRODUCTION: In elite sport mental skills are essential for success. To develop optimal mental skills for an athlete it is essential to understand the mental demands that are critical in each sport (Taylor, 1995). Furthermore, it is essential to have knowledge about the individual athletes` exclusive needs and skills, and how they respond to the potentially unique mental demands and challenges they face in their sport. The aim of this study was to investigate how World Class and elite beach volleyball players and coaches perceive the mental demands in their sport, and how they prepare for and respond to these demands. METHODS: Nine players (3 females and 6 males) and 4 coaches (1 female and 3 males) from the Norwegian national representative teams participated in individual semi-structured face-to-face interviews exploring perceived mental demands in Training, Competition and Relationships in high performance teams. The interviews were transcribed and coded using an inductive thematic analysis (Braun et al., 2016). RESULTS: Three themes emerged in the Training context as `presence`, `passion` and `self-regulated learning` with presence then including subthemes of `focus`, `resilience`, & `energy level`, and self-regulated learning including subthemes of `mastering`, and `knowledge development`. Five themes emerged in the Competition context as `presence`, `fear & doubt`, `shared mental model`, `cope with pressure`, and `balance`. Two themes emerged in the Relationships in high performance teams context as `intra-team cooperation` and `inter-team cooperation`, with intra-team cooperation including three subthemes of `communication`, `trust & safety`, and `wellbeing & friendship`. CONCLUSION: This study increases our understanding of the mental demands encountered by world class and elite beach volleyball players from the perspective of both the athletes and their coaches. Appreciation of the themes could enable coaches, and sport psychologists to optimize training sessions, competitions and relations using mental skill development strategies. Whilst the degree of the perceived mental demands could vary for each athlete, and notwithstanding the fact that individual adaptation is necessary for an athlete`s best possible performance, psychological interventions that help athletes better understand and subsequently manage these unique mental demands could contribute to more optimal performance.
© Copyright 2022 27th Annual Congress of the European College of Sport Science (ECSS), Sevilla, 30. Aug - 2. Sep 2022. Published by Faculty of Sport Science - Universidad Pablo de Olavide. All rights reserved.