The loud smack of her body hitting the water after a 3-meter dive wasn’t something Mairin Jameson wanted to feel and it wasn’t something her coaches wanted to hear. The fact she had just flopped the dive for the second straight time made matters worse.
Jameson was over-rotating her dives and was having trouble spotting the water. In addition to the swelling bruises on her legs, her head started to fill with doubts about her ability.
She finished the Jan. 18 meet poorly, in second-to-last place, and didn’t even attempt her signature dive that she failed twice in warm ups.
“I considered myself an athlete my whole life. Then I come to my senior season and you expect it to be this great thing,” Jameson said. “You put so much pressure on yourself because you want it to end a certain way. You want it to be that perfect finish to your whole life of athletics. It doesn’t always work like that.”
Jameson, at the time a senior diver for the University of Idaho swimming and diving team, let her performance anxiety get the best her that day in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She didn’t know it yet, but she would later become an Idaho school record holder and conference champion. At the time of her two devastating flops, she was one of many athletes who fall victim to sports performance anxiety.
Often, discussions about performance anxiety include public speaking, live music or theatrical performances, but it is something athletes deal with as well. In fact, some coaches say it’s something every athlete experiences.
“Everybody gets anxious and everybody gets nervous, everybody gets excited — it takes different forms,” said Mark Sowa, Idaho swimming and diving coach and Jameson’s former head coach. “It’s when it becomes handcuffing or limiting — then it becomes an issue we have to deal with.”
Sowa said anxiety is a sign athletes care about their chosen sport, so it’s not always bad.
“These athletes have been doing it for so long, they have a heck of a lot invested in it,” he said. “Not in terms of a monetary investment, but an emotional investment, a time investment. Sometimes when you get behind the blocks, get behind the diving board, you’re trying to validate all the work you’ve put into it.”
Being anxious isn’t limited to the pool or the diving board though. There’s the football player who vomits before every game, the softball player who can’t find the strike zone and the track runner who freezes in the starting blocks. Whether it’s from coaches, parents or themselves, athletes are under pressure to perform well.
A psychologist’s perspective
Anne Cox, a professor who teaches sport and exercise psychology at Washington State University, said performance anxiety is one of the biggest psychological issues athletes deal with. Cox has 10 years of experience doing research, teaching and consulting on sports psychology related issues.
“Performance anxiety is very, very common and a very typical reason why an athlete would seek out help,” Cox said.
Cox said anxiety usually originates when athletes can’t translate their success in practice to competition. Other times, anxiety stems from the pressure of playing a good team or opponent or even from coaches and parents.
“Probably unwittingly, a lot of what parents and coaches and others do is they talk about the outcome — you need to do this well or you need to win this game,” Cox said. “Whenever the athlete switches and begins thinking about those factors, they’ve taken themselves outside of their performance.”
There’s no magic solution to get over anxiety, Cox said, but one key tip to make it more manageable is to focus on routines. She said when athletes focus on themselves, it can help block outside distractions.
“A good example would be softball pitchers, because clearly a pitching routine is important,” Cox said. “Routines can involve things you say to yourself, it can involve motions you make with your body — just little things that they do prior to the pitch.”
Teaching a routine is beneficial to many athletes, Cox said, but she recently changed her approach to counseling athletes after conducting research on mindfulness. She said mindfulness is being in the present moment and is a current trend in sports psychology.
“When you’re in the moment, you’re not accepting worries about your coach or the spectators or the outcome of the game,” Cox said.
Overcoming anxiety
When athletes do overcome their performance anxiety, the success is sometimes greater than expected.
Heading into the final meet of her career at the Western Athletic Conference Championships, Jameson said she was still feeling unready after her two major flops earlier in the season. She had altogether missed an important invitational and underperformed during her Senior Night meet heading into the WAC Championships.
“Even leaving for conference, I didn’t feel 100 percent confident like I was at where I was at during the beginning of the year with my dives,” Jameson said. “I was standing on the board and my brain would be telling me that I didn’t know how to do a dive. There were a lot of tears, a lot of hard conversations with (dive coach) Kelly (Gufford).”
In preparation for the WAC Championships, Jameson said she spent many extra hours in the pool with coach Sowa and coach Gufford and she also spent time seeing a sports psychologist.
Eventually, she realized that whatever happens at the WAC Championship happens. The expectations were lower and she was finally just diving for herself in the moment — mindfulness.
“I got done with warm ups and I was just calm — almost eerily calm,” Jameson said. “I just couldn’t miss, I got into the meet and … I was so calm and so into my routine and I just kept saying to myself, ‘Just do what you do. Just do what you do everyday,’ over and over again.”
Jameson went on to win both the 1-meter and 3-meter dives in February 2014, at the WAC Championships, earning school records in both events. Her 3-meter score was nearly 100 points higher than in the meet where she flopped twice in warm ups one month earlier.
“She literally had the meet of her life,” Sowa said. “Every board she had was the best performance she’s ever had. For three days, she was nearly flawless.”
Jameson said trusting herself and not overthinking the dives was a major reason why she had success in the biggest meet of her life. She also said to take sports seriously, but to have fun along the way. Being too anxious can ruin more than just a dive or a meet.
“I think if I could look back and tell myself, or anybody else, I’d just say ‘Just enjoy it,'” Jameson said. “Sports are stressful and hard, especially at the Division I level you put a lot of pressure yourself, but I think in order to perform at the highest level, you have to be confident … Just really realize it will all be OK no matter what. Do it for you and just enjoy it.”