Athlete resilience training (ART) program: an evidence based intervention to improve resilience in collegiate golfers after performance failure a manual for coaches and athletes

Resilience is important for an athlete to perform optimally. Attribution style, lack of coping mechanisms and negative thought patterns contribute to the stress and anxiety that performers feel. These issues can be the determining factor in whether they fail or succeed within their given sport. Psychological resilience has been studied in a variety of context including inmate populations, post-disaster communities, school aged children, the workplace and with military personnel. Until recently, this concept has not been examined with athletic populations. Those studies that do exist are focused on professional athletes and Olympic champions. While resilience has been demonstrated as trainable, no such training programs or intervention strategies have been created for collegiate golfers. Competitive athletes can experience a wide variety of significant stressors which can hinder performance. Whether it is performance failure, injury, interpersonal relationships or demands from the organization, it is inevitable that an athlete will face some sort of hardship in their career. This Athlete Resilience Training (ART) program includes a variety of modules such as positive personality, social support, attention and physiological control and coping skills. These are designed to help athletes develop the skills and resources necessary to limit the potentially detrimental effects that stressors can have on performance. The purpose of this ART program is to develop skills that have been demonstrated to increase resilience in humans to help them flourish in the face of adversity. This program has been designed to help collegiate golfers maintain optimal performance following a performance mistake.