This mixed methods study was an exploratory investigation of the world of athletics. The journey towards greatness, excellence, or personal success is often accompanied by countless triumphs and tribulations. Athletes, driven by their relentless pursuit of success, often become fixated on the ultimate goal, involuntarily overlooking the crucial…

The word "talent" is used across many sport disciplines -- to describe an athlete's prowess (i.e. "he is talented"), as a term for what is sought after during assessment and selection (i.e. talent selection camps) or in reference to players to be developed (i.e. "a group of talents"). While the term has received…

Highly successful athletes must learn how to optimize factors that facilitate flow and effectively manage factors that inhibit flow. This article explains what coaches can do to push the flow button and motivate athletes to have peak experiences and improved performance.

The aim of the current study was to verify the internal and external validity of the construct of implicit beliefs concept in the sports context, the Conceptions of the Nature of Athletic Ability Questionnaire-2 (CNAAQ-2). The data of this study were collected from 322 adolescent football players by using CNAAQ-2 and MT (Mental Toughness)…

This online experimental study examined the roles of race and student-athlete status in college student perceptions of peers' academic and intellectual skills and favorability. College student participants (n = 376) were randomly assigned to view a photograph (i.e., Black student-athlete, Black non-student-athlete, White student-athlete, White…

Inclusive sports have emerged as a potential tool for building social inclusion within diverse populations. The Special Olympics Unified Sports programs are an example of inclusion initiatives specific to students with intellectual disability and sports that can be reevaluated with new understandings of inclusion. This systematic mixed studies…

This study aims to present an integrative review of research on the models used for identification and development of sports talent. It has two purposes: (1) to systematically analyze the models followed to identify and develop sports talent in the period of 2012-2021 and (2) to determine the model that is mostly followed in sports talent…

Free throw shooting percentage has averaged around 75% for nearly five decades. However, free throw percentages significantly increased to 79% during the 2020 spectator-less National Basketball Association season. The current study investigated if the elevated free throw shooting percentage observed during the spectator-less season has returned to…

Concussion education is widely mandated and largely ineffective. Recent consensus guidance on concussion education asserts the importance of (1) theory-driven programming that targets the team as a system and (2) working with end users throughout the development process, and considering issues such as feasibility, acceptability, and…

Background: This study aims to investigate the impact of neuromuscular training (NMT) on static and dynamic postural balance (PB) among high-level male runners with intellectual disability. Method: Twenty-seven runners were randomly assigned to a NMT group and a control group who maintained their conventional training. Static and dynamic PB were…

Athletic skills acquired through deliberate practice are essential for expert sports performance. Some authors even suggest that practice circumvents the limits of working memory capacity (WMC) in skill acquisition. However, this circumvention hypothesis has been challenged recently by the evidence that WMC plays an important role in expert…

Our aim was to identify the suitability of three assessment tools (i.e., Flanker test, Updating Word Span, and Color Trails Test) for future inclusion in the classification process of elite Paralympic athletes with intellectual disability and to assess the strength of the relation between Executive function (EF) and intelligence. Cognitive and EF…

Background: Influence is at the very core of physical education and sport pedagogy. Indeed, a large and growing body of work has focused on the (inter)actions of sport pedagogues which "are" deemed to be influential in terms of shaping the thoughts, feelings and actions of others. In comparison, little attention has been paid to the…

The increasing number of professional athletes pursuing careers abroad has attracted acculturation research viewing athletes' accounts of their own experiences as the ultimate truth. However, studying athletes' intercultural experience through such a lens often ignores the contextual factors influencing intercultural communication (IC), which may…

Given the stance of education-based sport entities (i.e., NFHS) that sport participation leads to leadership development, this article aims to provide coaches and practitioners several strategies to teach leadership skills anchored in principles from skill acquisition literature. The principles explored include (1) identification of skill…