Public Engagement Placement: Session 1
As part of the MSc Psychology of Sport programme, we are required to undertake a placement within an organisation, delivering a sport psychology service to their stakeholders. Two other students and I have been placed in a local authority high school, working with a girls’ football team on a series of three workshops, and today was our first session!
Up to this point, we had only met the staff at the school, so today was our first interaction with the pupils themselves. I have delivered workshops and coaching sessions for children before, and this experience was useful to draw upon to calm my nerves before the session began. We introduced ourselves before giving a brief overview of sport psychology, allowing the pupils to discuss their perceptions of sport psychology amongst themselves. The three of us felt that the pupils should have a degree of autonomy over the content of the workshop series, and they gave some great ideas to shape the next two workshops.
During today’s session, the pupils expressed an interest in discovering more about imagery and it’s application within football, and we are planning on covering this next week. Initially, we thought that we would cover three self-talk sessions as, during our observations of the pupils, we noticed they often succumbed to pressure and were quite vocal on the pitch. Our observations were quite brief however, thus we decided to continue our needs analysis in today’s workshop, at which point the team all expressed the interest in imagery. The pupils seemed excited by the prospect of having an input into the content of the sessions, as their curriculum is usually pre-determined and their personal interests are perhaps overlooked. As a presenting group, we want as much buy-in as possible from the pupils, and anything which helps with their engagement, such as covering topics they are interested in, is very welcome.
Over the next couple of weeks, we will continue to work with the pupils on topics relating to sport psychology. We do not have an end goal as such, but we aim to introduce the pupils to a variety of sport psychology techniques which may inspire them to include mental skills into their game. We all know that small increments can make significant differences in sport, thus even having an awareness of the benefit of psychology to sport performance may be beneficial for these young players.
