Hockey Motivation

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For a club athlete in college a lot of your motivation has to come from your passion for the sport. It does not come with the perks like much of the division one sports which provide incentives for more motivation, as well as the benefit of decent practice times that fit your schedule a lot better than club athletics. That’s why I choose to focus and implement the psychological skills training for our hockey practices, and a couple games because that fell into the week time period in which this was being implemented. The mental skill that I think has fallen off for me the most I think is the motivation, each day at practice gets harder and harder to get up for so I really tried applying Imagery to help improve that. Tackling this hump of trying …show more content…

I would do this two times, once before bed I would watch a couple hockey videos and then right before practice when I taped my stick. Before bed I watched the moments that I thought were or remembered to be exciting and inspiring and were in my mind the most memorable videos. Such videos would include when Ray Borque won the Stanley cup with the Colorado Avalanche, or the top playoff moments to highlight videos of exciting and my favorite players like James Neal, or Tie Domi and Darcy Tucker. Then before practice when I would tape my stick I would try and remember some of those moments and or highlights from those players and try and hit the ice imagining it was those moments or try and copy some of those highlight videos moves. I was hoping that after watching these videos the excitement to compete in practice would increase back closer to 100% rather than the 60% where it is at now. To me practice is a key part to how you perform during games, as the saying goes you practice how you play. But even more importantly in a team sport especially hockey, and as a veteran to the team I think that if my inconsistency in practice continues it could ultimately start to hurt not only my game but the teams especially knowing how well we can play when everyone on the team is committed to the team …show more content…

I noticed that it helped me get up for the early Monday morning practice and really started the week off well. Which I think translated into a more positive outlook on the rest of the week’s practices. It was kind of a tough week to start this program for the fact that despite trying to improve practice performance we had a big four games that weekend so I knew that there was pressure to have a good week of practice to translate it into games. The results of having a good week of practice were obvious from the results from the weekend in which I had three goals and two assists, including a overtime game winner, and along with the success of the team going 3-0-1. So to keep kind of testing this idea that imagery can help increase the performance in practices I have continued it through this week as well. So far I think using this imagery to increase motivation during all times of practice and games has helped a bit, but we will see this weekend if it also helps with increased performance. Despite the good performance during the weekend, most of the success or positivity happened earlier during the week in practice and as the week went on the motivation that was there earlier in the week faded off. This might have been due to everything going on with the week

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