Major psychological factors affecting short distance athlete‟s performance: the case of hadiya zone athletics projects

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the major psychological factors affecting short distance athlete’s performance of Hadiya Zone athletics projects. In order to achieve the proposed study crosssectional design was applied. Both primary and secondary source data were used. In this Zone three athletics projects namely Mesha, Soro and Duna were included in this study. In case 8 sport experts and officers, and 4 coaches were selected by using purposive technique and 80 athletes (by using stratified sampling techniques) a total of 92 were selected to be the subject of the study. The data were collected through questionnaires, interview, observation and document analysis. In order to ensure content reliability and validity of study the standardized questionnaires to be used. The collected data was analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics. The finding indicated that easily feel tense on their body, afraid gender serotype of society, and coaches response trough training session and athletes were calm even in nervous situation, depressed and irritated this revealed highly found anxiety and personality factors and athletic anxiety and personality factors on performance of sprinters’ multiple regression coefficient results indicates, by 40.1% of variance (R 2 =.165, F = 8.194, *p < .05) anxiety and personality predict athletes’ performance. Finally the researcher on the basis of finding of the study recommendations were drawn, the sport experts, officers and coaches should find away to upgrade the knowledge of psychological skill training. Regional Athletics Federation and officers of Zone Youth and Sport bureau should be work with different stakeholders to increase athlete’s psychological skill gape.