S.W.O.T

Strengths and Weaknesses

The strengths of Natalie Bells athletic performance include that she said her strength is her height as well as this I can see that she is highly motivated as she said she would love to continue in the sport later on in her life. She managed to stay motivated by thinking about playing as her team and liking her team and who she plays with. As well as this a strength of Natalie's is that she said she doesn't get nervous before a match and instead feels calm and relaxed as it is a team sport. As she has also been involved in the sport since she was in primary school, this means that she is experienced and knows a lot about the sport and has also seen herself improve.

Her main weaknesses and areas for improvement also include her motivation, even though she would enjoy to continue playing netball later on in her she didn't manage to stay in the Loughborough College Netball Academy Team as she was very demotivated by her coach and said she didn't really do much to keep her motivated, so this let me see that Natalie is motivated by the people around her and she needs encouragement from her teams mates and the coach. She said herself that an area of improvement would be maintaining her fitness levels, even though she doesn't like doing fitness but maybe with a bit of motivation she wouldn't mind it and would stick to it. Struggles to compete against new crowds of people or a new team that she hasn't played against before as she doesn't know what they're going to play like.

Opportunities

Opportunities for Natalie include that when she goes to university she will be able to join a more serious netball team there, possibly with a better and more motivational netball coach and a team who she gets on with which could help with her motivational levels. As well as this as Natalie wants to maintain her fitness levels and to gain more fitness but its quite expensive to join a gym and she prefers going with someone else so that they can encourage her to keep going, when she goes university she can also join a gym which is much cheaper and she can go with her other netball friends as they will most likely be living on the same university campus as her.

Other opportunities which Natalie can do are join a team with a better coach or get more involved in the sport and maybe try out so that she can reach a higher level, even though she said she'd prefer to stay recreational because it is less competitive, however I feel as though if she had the enough motivation and encouragement this could change meaning that she will then want to maybe compete at a higher level and there are lots of opportunities for her to do so.

Threats

The threats could be that her motivation might decrease if she was to join another team as she enjoys who she plays with but the coach doesn't help with her development or motivation. As well as this Natalie has a part time job as a waitress and sales assistance so this takes up a lot of her time, meaning that she wont be able to train or compete as much as she wants to and her job will take up a lot of her time and as well as this when she goes into full time education she will struggle to deal with work load as well as playing netball. If she isn't able to handle all this or she struggles with her self management in turn this means she wont play and that her fitness levels will decrease and this is the last thing she wants as she said she would love to keep and improve her fitness levels. Also performing for a different team might affect Natalie's attitude towards netball, if she joins a teams and they are better than she is or worse than the team she played for before this may affect how she feels about playing and therefore she wont want to train or compete. When she ages so does everyone else, so everyone else because more experience and even better at the sport so if she was to a join a team where they played much better than she did then she'd either be on the bench the whole game or feel really under pressure to perform well as well as demotivated.




PST

This is psychological skills training, and as said by Gill, 2000 it is an '...individually designed combination of methods selected to attain psychological skill needs'. The reasons as to why we need to train are psychological skills is included I research conducted by Calmels et al in 2003, they were able to show how athletes went from being unsuccessful to successful by having great concentration, confidence, task orientated thoughts, low anxiety, positive thoughts as well as images and also more determination and commitment. There are different phases within PST, they include;

First Phase, this is the educational phase, this means that the psychological skills we need, need to be leant and practiced, and you need to be able to see clear improvements so that you know that you are actually developing these skills. This is done in the first and sixth week of training.
Second Phase, this is the acquisition phase, this is when you focus on the strategies and other techniques that will help you learn the psychological skills and helps you meet your individual needs, providing information to the team and making sure that everything you say is specific when you are developing their program.
Third Phase, this is the practice phase, and this is when you learn the psychological skills so that you are progressing from practices and stimulations moving onto real competitions. In this phase you need to make sure that you are focusing on improving your understand of the skills by overlearning , integrating, psychological skills and also stimulating the different skills which you want to apply to the competitions that you are going to be competing in.