Welcome!

Welcome to Cedersport!

My name is Niklas Cederström and I recently received a  Master’s Degree in Sport Sciences with an Emphasis in Sport Psychology at Lund University in Sweden.

I will be writing about  interesting things that are happening in the world of sport, psychology, and sport psychology! Since psychology is a huge part of sport, I think it’s important to include all aspects of the mind when considering athletic training, and I will try to emphasize how it can help in athletic endeavours. Since it’s the mind and is with us all the time, I will also try to include things on how sport and psychology can help us in our everyday lives, as well.

I hope you enjoy what you read and learn some new things about how to use the mental aspect in training and in life to become the best athlete (or person) you can be!

Sport-related Injuries: More than just sport-related?

Sports injuries are extremely common in everything from youth to professional sports. It is something that almost every coach I’ve spoken to is aware of and concerned about. They include injury-preventive exercises in their trainings and they use tape and braces. But does that really cover everything involved?

Recent studies have shown injured athletes are physically ready to return to sport following rehabilitation, but up to 50% of them quit after 2 to 3 years (1). This leads me to question the physical aspect of injuries. Maybe there’s something else going on?

There are a lot of theories about why an athlete might get injured and how we can prevent it. One thing that seems to be present in all psychological literature surrounding sport injury is the impact of non-sports life on sports. That is, an athlete with a lot of stress at school, at home, at work, may be more susceptible to injury. The idea is that there is a strong connection between all different aspects of life, which in turn affect the athlete biologically, and vise versa. A very broad and intriguing example of this is the biopsychosocial proposition that biological factors influence psychological factors influence social factors, and they all influence one another. An injured person that can no longer participate in the activities he or she wants to can be depressed and irritable, upsetting the people close to them. A healthy person might have a fight with his girlfriend and be worried about that at practice. He’s not focusing totally on his practice and he steps wrong, causing an injury. There’s a connection between everything in life.

We know that these connections exist, but what can we do about it?

Since we know these connections exist and happen, we need to ask ourselves what we can do about it. The first step is identifying stressors. As a coach or athlete, you don’t want to fill out a bunch of questionnaires. So, the first step would be to train yourself to recognize stress. If an athlete is having a hard time at school, he or she needs to be able to recognize exactly what it is that is stressful. Is it a big paper deadline? An upcoming test? Overall stress about grades? Once they are a bit more clear on what is stressful, it can be narrowed down even further to decide that it is a particular set of equations on her math test. Now that we can be specific about the stressor, we can look into possible solutions. Talking to a teacher, a tutor, a friend that’s good at math, anyone that can help specifically with the problem will help to relieve the stress, or at least get the athlete on the right track to clearing things up.

But what about right now, when I’m supposed to be training? That’s where we get into something called Mindfulness. There’s a theory in sport psychology called the Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment model (2) which focuses on being aware of feelings and emotions (in this case whatever stressors are affecting the athlete) and evaluating them non-judgmentally in terms of goals and commitment to the sport. This means essentially that the athlete needs to think about his or her goals in the sport, identify what he or she is feeling at the moment, and react in a way that will help in achieving the sport-related goals. The hard part of this is thinking about the sport and not letting outside stressors get in the way. It will take time and practice, but eventually the athlete will be able to focus fully on the sport and achieving the goals that he or she is working towards.

From a coaching perspective, it is extremely important to help the athlete focus on mastering the sport. Results are not important in training, and so the coach should always help to focus the athlete’s efforts on improving a skill and becoming a better athlete through quality training, encouragement and positive feedback. Coach-initiated mastery-climate, as this is called, has been shown to reduce anxiety in athletes (3), so being aware of the kind of climate you are creating as a coach can help to reduce stress and anxiety, which can help increase motivation and focus for an athlete struggling with external stressors.

Injury is a part of sport, but I firmly believe that the instance of injury can be decreased with effective training of both the body and mind to deal with any stressors that may arise. These skills are not only important for a competitive athlete, but also a businessperson, a teacher, a parent. Being able to handle stress well will increase your quality of life. This is only one method of working with stress-related injuries, but it is one that can help maintain focus on motivation in an effort to help reduce stressors.

 

1. Ardern CL, Webster KE, Taylor NF, Feller JA. Return to sport following anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction surgery: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the state of play. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2011;45(7):596-606.
2. Gardner FL, Moore ZE. A mindfulness-acceptance-commitment-based approach to athletic performance enhancement: Theoretical considerations. Behavior Therapy. 2004;35(4):707-23.
3. Smith RE, Smoll FL, Cumming SP. Effects of a Motivational Climate Intervention for Coaches on Young Athletes’ Sport Performance Anxiety. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology. 2007;29(1):39-59.

“Expert” Commentary is like school in summer – no class

I like watching sports. It’s fun and entertaining. It can be motivational and inspiring. It can be a way to pass the time. It can be a matter of national pride. It can be whatever you want. That being said, I don’t like listening to the commentators. Don’t get me wrong, I like commentary. I just don’t like most of the commentating that goes on. If you listen to a football game on the radio, you’ll hear a play-by-play description of what is happening on the field. If you watch that same game on TV, though, you’ll have “expert commentary” from former players, coaches, and in some cases what seems to be people that have watched the sport for a long time and have decided that they know best. This is all well and good if we can get an unbiased report of what is happening on the field, on the ice, in the pool. Often, though, this is not the case.

The positive side of expert commentary is, of course, the analysis that can help the layman understand what is going on in the competition. I am by no means an expert in swimming, so when I watch a competition, I do appreciate getting a little information about why a swimmer may choose a specific turn technique. For people that follow the sport, up-to-date stats may be appreciated. This goes back to the unbiased reporting, though. It is meant to be able to bring excitement and information into the competition. And a good commentator has the ability to do just that.

However, it seems that everyone has to have something to say about a mistake. It doesn’t even have to be a mistake; sometimes it can be a slight imperfection. But the commentators are sure to point that out, and you can count on them to bring it up later, as well. How many times have we seen a missed pass, a badly timed stroke, a slight imbalance early in a competition? Arguably just about every athletic competition ever. And how many times has the commentator brought that up within a few minutes, whether in response to the athlete “making up for that last mistake” or to comment on how bad of a day this athlete is having. A lot. And how many times is it necessary? Not once.

Athletes are human beings that have worked incredibly hard to get to the elite level in their respective sports. But, I think the key thing here is that they are humans. Yes, they have worked incredibly hard and so we may be allowed to hold them to a higher standard, but at what point are we allowed to tear them apart because of a slight mistake? We have come to expect absolute perfection from the athletes that we idolize. Often we forget that these people are working extremely hard to fix their mistakes, or to come back from a slump. They have coaches and they don’t need the advice of a network-proclaimed expert to be able to perform at their best.

I’ll give you an example:

During a diving competition, one competitor had a few imperfect dives. The first was not a horrible miss, just slightly off. The next one was a bit worse. Every time that athlete was shown on screen, the commentator made sure to bring up how horribly this athlete had been diving and how disappointed the athlete and coaches must be with the performance (if memory serves, her word choice included ‘disgrace’). I got the feeling she thought this athlete was not worthy of being an elite athlete because of a bad day – a day with a massive amount of pressure and nerves to deal with, along with incredibly complex and difficult movements. But she knows best from her pedestal in the press box. Of course.

I understand the need for commentary, and I appreciate it in a lot of cases. We as spectators and fans need to understand one thing, though. These men and women competing are far better than you and I will ever be. I know a lot about the hammer throw. I’ve been involved in it for quite some time and I can identify things that may have gone slightly wrong, but I cannot throw on the same level as the world-class men and women. It’s not fair of us to completely ignore the massive amount of training and work that goes into developing the skills necessary to compete at the elite level. And I think we need to turn the criticism on the commentators. Some have done exactly what they are commentating on and know how difficult it is. Those people should be a bit more sympathetic and understanding of what is happening. Others have watched from the sidelines their entire lives and couldn’t even come close to competing to save their lives. Still others seem to just want to be heard and end up giving non-answers, talking their way around any technical aspects with fancy graphics and words that don’t tell us anything.

There’s a pretty well-known tweet going around the internet (I think it’s from a Bill Murray parody account – but don’t quote me on that) saying that we should include one average person in each event to get an idea of exactly how impressive these men and women are.

That may be a bit extreme, but we can at the very least pretend to have some semblance of dignity and respect for people that have dedicated their lives to being better than us. And they are. So stop degrading their hard work. Please.

Active Meditation – An oxymoron?

I have been involved in sport almost my whole life, but I’ve never really thought about why we were doing what we were doing. Once I started studying sport psychology, I got to understand a little better what had been happening throughout my sport career. Some of my coaches had me doing relaxation exercises. We’d lie on the ground and visualize, or we’d do slow-motion drills to prepare for the full-speed throw. They told us about elite football players that would do ballet to clear their minds, get a non-football workout, and work on their flexibility. All of these things raised an eyebrow in teenage me. It sounded ridiculous. As I read into the sport psychology literature, though, I saw the benefits of being able to control your breathing and relax on cue. I started to realize that when I was relaxed, I would compete better. But are these weird techniques really the way to get there?

So that brings us to something that has become a bit of a buzzword: meditation. What is it?

Meditation can be described as attentional focus on a specific object over time, with particular attention paid to maintaining attention – that is, the ability to avoid distraction (1). It can be simplified further by stating that it is a method of training attention, specifically selection of relevant objects (2). Within this very broad range of mental training, different methods can be used. The classic idea of this is sitting quietly trying to clear one’s head of all thought. Think of nothing and allow that to fill your head. This is extremely difficult, but with practice, it can be done. At first, thoughts will force their way in, but eventually, you will learn to dismiss those and clear your head of all worries.

Mindfulness meditation falls under the same category, but with the addition of another aspect: recognition of attitudes and feelings, with no reaction (3). In this method, a person can train how to acknowledge anger, fear, happiness, or whatever other reaction and be able to evaluate it completely indifferently or not at all. The idea is not to dismiss all thoughts, but to recognize them and control your reaction to them. For example, a person sitting in traffic might be extremely nervous about being late to a meeting. That person can either recognize that, yes, I am nervous, and that’s ok. I’ll do what I can to make it right, but there’s nothing I can do now. Or that person can try to manipulate his or her attitude into thinking “oh man, I’m really late, this is crazy, I’m really feeling the butterflies in my stomach, that’s pretty cool!” The idea behind this is that being able to recognize feelings does not necessarily have to mean that you’re stuck into those feelings, but that you can instead change them around a bit and gain some control over how you’re thinking.

The last method we’ll look at is a more repetitive approach. Zen gardens, tai chi, even something like knitting or carving can be a repetitive motion that will let your mind wander. Coloring has become a mindfulness activity. Stay in the lines, make it look nice, and all of the sudden, that has filled your head and you forget your worries and become lost in the work. I get stuck quite often in writing, so I make an effort to walk away from it and do something mindless and repetitive. During this time, my thoughts go all over the place, but in the end, when I come back to my work, I feel more clear-headed. It’s just like resting between sets when weight-lifting. You have to let things reset a bit.

So, how can it be brought into sport? I tend to think that asking athletes to sit quietly and clear their minds will garner the same reaction I gave as a teenager: a raised eyebrow and sideways glance to teammates; a chuckle and a silent promise to not fall for this nonsense. But we can try to make it relevant. Just like walking away and taking a walk in the woods can help when you’re having trouble planning your next training session, taking a break to do simple, easy tasks can be pleasant and relevant to sport. I think it’s easiest to do more passive meditation, maybe doing repetitive passing exercises right after a hard drill, juggling on the sidelines, or requiring a video game tournament right after practice. It’s a task that requires a lot of concentration, but that can be done while letting your thoughts move to all corners of your head. And in the end, it will help with relaxation. Or can you maybe have your athletes do a sort of tai-chi? Something that looks like a slow-motion pass or a jump, have the athletes focus solely on what their body is doing in order to alter the attentional chain and help the training session in the end.

The hardest one is mindfulness meditation. This can be done by actively putting your athletes in difficult situations and forcing them to go out of the comfort zone. Once they have gotten there, it’s a matter of discussing with them what kind of thoughts come in. Those thoughts are completely normal, but they have no real basis in this sport. You know what to do, but your fear is making it harder than it actually is. Let them figure out what feelings come up and how they can make them go away. It might involve self-talk, or maybe they can go over a goal-checklist before each game or training to help them realize how much work they’ve done. The idea here is quite simple. Make your athletes uncomfortable and force them to figure it out. Talk to them where you need to, but they should be thinking about their thinking.

To summarize very briefly (and more deeply scientific), meditation can help focused attention by training spatial attention to attend to the entire field of vision more quickly (1).; i.e. a person will typically first see a forest, then a tree, then a branch, then a leaf. Meditation can help to see the whole much faster. In a sports setting, this might mean being able to attend to the entire rink, including the offense, defense, puck, goalie, and any openings that can create scoring chances. It may also improve the ability to attend to specific things more accurately (4), making sure the pass goes where it needs to go. Along with this, there is a suggestion that meditation can work on a cognitive level to increase the brain’s ability to maintain focus over time.

It’s important to note that, in order for these to work, it has to be done right. When training mindfulness, make sure the athlete is fully aware of thoughts and is making a real effort to get past those thoughts with no reaction and re-focus on training. During practice, it might help to do some active meditation, changing the task and doing something easy and repetitive to re-set the brain.

 

Happy meditating!

 

1. Van Leeuwen S, Singer W, Melloni L. Meditation increases the depth of information processing and improves the allocation of attention in space. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2012;6(133):16.
2. Kozasa EH, Sato JR, Lacerda SS, Barreiros MAM, Radvany J, Russell TA, et al. Meditation training increases brain efficiency in an attention task. NeuroImage. 2012;59(1):745-9.
3. Moore A, Derose J, Malinowski P, Gruber T. Regular, brief mindfulness meditation practice improves electrophysiological markers of attentional control. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2012(JANUARY 2012).
4. Van Den Hurk PAM, Giommi F, Barendregt HP, Gielen SC, Speckens AEM. Greater efficiency in attentional processing related to mindfulness meditation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 2010;63(6):1168-80.

Group Performance Enhancement Consultant – Lunds Tekniska Högskola

There was an article about me written in a school magazine today. It even made the front page. I’m feeling pretty good about it.

For the past few months, I’ve been working with the school of engineering at Lunds University in Lund, Sweden. Specifically, I work with the food sciences department. They have a big group project that is worth a substantial part of their grade and a requirement for their masters degree. My role has been to provide these students with theoretical information about how to work together. We have two lectures, the first of which deals with what group dynamics is, from an organizational psychology perspective, which is then followed by a workshop. The second lecture will deal more with communication and how to get the most out of group work.

The workshop I did was meant mainly to show them the power of teamwork with a series of exercises that required them to trust one another, listen carefully to instructions, and work together to complete a specific task. During this workshop, there was a reporter and photographer present. They were working on an article for a university magazine called LUM (Lunds Universitets Magasin, in Swedish). The article was written to highlight the fact that several different departments having been working together to reach their goals. As with any institute of higher learning, their main goal is to provide students with an opportunity to learn and improve their skills in a way which will be beneficial in the future. This is no exception. The leader of the course contacted a member of the faculty in the psychology department and was referred to me. He explained that his students are fully capable of completing this project, but that there is some aspect of teamwork and communication that is lacking. I was invited to lecture and hold a workshop, as well as some smaller group meetings in order to specifically work on their communication and teamwork in order for the groups to perform to their best potential and create a product that they could be proud of and that reflected their hard work and dedication.

The article that was released today made it clear that what I have been doing has worked. I am quite proud to have been chosen for this and to have been able to influence these students in a positive way. It’s always exciting to be able to apply my knowledge and to get credit for it, and I’m very excited to see that sport psychology can be applied in more areas than one. It goes to show that the concepts that I’ve been applying to sport can also apply to any competitive and close-knit group working towards a goal.

Change Doesn’t Have to be Scary: Adaption of Training

Throughout my academic and athletic careers, I have come to understand a few things about becoming a better athlete. The most important, I think, is the concept of adaptation of training. From a sport psychological perspective, the concept is simply using a combination of imagery and physical training to adapt training to make it resemble your sport.

I started my career studying psychology and philosophy. I was also a thrower on the track and field team at my university. Not long after I started competing, injuries started getting to me. I competed for four seasons and ended my career with 3 surgeries. The first was my right wrist, then the next summer my left wrist. The last, and most serious, was on my hip. It was about 4 months before I could even touch a hammer for about 6 months, and it was 8 months before I could compete again.

They were asking what I would eat if I could. I hadn’t eaten in 12 hours and was quite hungry. So mean.

For those long months that I was stuck in the training room doing my rehab, I had a lot of time to focus on my schoolwork. It was horrible. From that horror came some good, though. I focused on my studies in psychology and my thoughts wandered often to how this could apply to me. I started to read more and more on what could be done to get me back on my feet, both literally and figuratively. Since I couldn’t compete, I also took some time to educate myself on my injury and my sport. I learned about what had happened to me and how it affected my muscles.

In my studies, I came across what I would later learn to be sport psychology. This formed the basis for how I proceeded in my career. The most important thing that I learned was how to adapt training to help me achieve my goals.
I met with my coaches and trainers to find a way to make my training resemble my sport. I used imagery to make it as realistic as possible. This included a lot of film review and technical training (with none of the physical). I gained a lot of insight into how the sport worked and what I would need to do once I could throw again. This is the first step in adapting training. If you can understand how your sport works, it will be easier to figure out what kind of things might be possible.

Once you know that, you can work on actually implementing the adaptations. The physical training I was going through was helping, but I didn’t see a lot of similarities to my sport. When I met with my coaches and trainers, I talked about how we can make these more similar. My first step was to use a medicine ball to work on keeping my balance while rotating. This is a very simple way to take something I had to do and turn it into something I wanted to do. It was meaningful and sport-specific.

That’s it. I used the same logic throughout my rehab to make every single exercise more meaningful. All it takes is a little understanding (which is something every athlete should do anyway), and some critical thinking (again, something every athlete should do) to create something that looks like your sport.

I still use this method today on my healthy body. I have started throwing again, and with a little extra thought, I can break down my throws and take a small piece of that throw to work on. You can do it, too, if you take a moment to understand what you’re doing, and why. There are countless theories and programs dedicated to exactly this concept (which I had no idea of when I started), but with a bit of effort, it is entirely possible to adapt your training to make it more meaningful, more effective, and you will become a better athlete.

Fair-Weather Teams: The Danger of Striving for Wins

In the world of sport, there is a huge fan following, with several types of fans. You’ve got the lifelong fans, the distance-based fans, the adopted fan, or maybe a fan that is attracted by the mascot or the city itself, as well as fans that follow talent. The most controversial is probably the fan that picks and chooses a team to root for based on wins – the fair-weather fan. This fan is typically looked down upon and is berated for their lack of faith or loyalty to a specific team and only want the feeling of victory and subsequent belonging.

Kent Olsson, Pic-Agency Sweden, retrieved from: http://malmoredhawks.com/Nyheter/150410-Sasongskort/

While fan-bases are nothing new, and neither are the bitter rivalries and trash-talking that come with them, there is something that seems to often be forgotten. The players and staff involved in those teams. Recently in Sweden, there was a hockey final in which one team moved up to the highest league and another moved down. Following all of this, there has been a series of moves, firings, and overhauls of teams, a common occurrence in all sports (links are in Swedish – sorry). My question is this: what happens to those ‘fair-weather teams’? I wonder whether the players and staff that leave due to a losing season (whether by choice, through a trade, or by firing) suffer any negative effects and whether the goal of improving is actually possible?

I’m going to start with a little bit of sport psychology theory to give an overview of why I think this is an interesting question. First, when looking at changing a team, you need to be aware that this changes the whole dynamic of the team. It doesn’t matter if one player or coach leaves, there will be some change in how the team works together. This is based on what we call Team Cohesion, which is the ability of the members of the team to work together to complete a goal. To have a team with good cohesion, you need to have a few clear roles. First, you need a coaching staff with a good leadership style that works with the team. Second, you need players that understand their role on the team. Lastly, you need those players to work together to create an environment where all those roles fit with one another perfectly. Let’s take American football as an example (since there are extremely clear roles there). First, you have a head coach that coordinates with everyone. This coach needs to be able to work with every member of the team, understand where the weaknesses and strengths are, and design a game plan that will utilize all the tools they have in the team. Then you have the coaching staff, typically split into offense and defense. On the offensive side, you have the quarterback, who is often considered the leader and makes on-field decisions that impact the style of play for the rest of the team. You also have running backs and receivers that react to this and attempt to work with the quarterback to create scoring opportunities. The linemen, the big boys up front that protect the rest of the team, have to know what type of play (passing or running) and which direction the ball will go so that they can effectively protect the ball and allow the rest of the players on the field to effectively do their job.

There are a lot of moving parts here. If one of those players doesn’t understand how the rest of the team is thinking or what their exact role is, they create a weakness that can be exploited. In this sense, it is extremely important that they are all on the same page in terms of tactics and team cohesion.

Suppose now that one of those players (the quarterback for simplicity’s sake) is traded after a losing season. There are a few things that the rest of the team will think: 1) my quarterback was not doing his job effectively, but I was doing just fine – I don’t need to change; 2) I wasn’t doing enough to protect my quarterback or allow scoring opportunities – I need to get a lot better; 3) who is this new guy and how does he play?

The third question a very likely question, and one that I am concerned with. Replacing any member of the team will create questions about how the rest of the team is working. The communication will not be the same until they build up a sense of trust and mutual understanding with this new player. This takes time. Research indicates that it can take a few weeks to happen, or it could never happen. In a professional team, in which these players are dependent upon playing well, this is not a very good margin of error. Of course, the players in question are very good and professional, meaning that they may cut down on that time a bit. The fact remains, though, that things have changed and it will take some getting used to.

Career transition is an area of sport psychology dedicated to examining how athletes psychologically handle changes in their career (from junior to senior to professional to retirement, and every change in between). These changes take their toll. It is hard for an athlete to make a decision to move, or to cope with the fact that their former organization does not believe in them enough. A psychological blow like this can break a career. What’s at stake here? Motivation, desire, fun, understanding, money, friendships, and sometimes even family, among many other things. This is a lot to think about that the organization typically seems to completely ignore. Their thought is just as I stated earlier. These athletes are professionals. They are paid to play – at an elite level. They have to perform, just like any other occupation.

The issue here is that the athlete is placed in a unique situation that cannot be compared to any other occupation. They are not working in an office in front of a computer. These individuals are working on a field in front of millions of viewers, each of whom is critiquing their every move.

My point here is that athletes are often treated as objects. Recent drama in the National Collegiate Athletics Association in the US has raised eyebrows. Are student-athletes actually just athletes? Does the university actually care about the students? These students are sacrificing a huge amount just to be able to play at a high level, and the NCAA doesn’t even think they owe the players an education. Likewise in the professional leagues, the owners and staff at clubs don’t seem to think that athletes deserve the dignity of human understanding.

In order to build a successful sporting franchise, it is absolutely necessary to take this psychological and mental aspect of athletics to heart. If an athlete is taken care of and feels welcome, if he or she feels that the team actually cares about integrating them into the team and they feel taken care of so that they can continue to play at a high level, they will. The athlete that is thrust into play and expected to do well with no help from the club will not. This has been seen again and again, but clubs don’t seem to get it.

A loss in sports is taken personally, despite what fans and clubs might believe.
Picture retrieved from:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_8110000/newsid_8111100/8111122.stm

Those teams that only want success at the cost of their players need to understand the humanity of their craft. Where patience, understanding and compassion rule, performance will follow. Allowing an athlete to thrive, as opposed to expecting or hoping for the best, is the key to a successful program. My question is: are die-hard fans that demand change without considering the players any different from those fair-weather fans they so despise?

Women’s World Championships in Ice Hockey: Did you see it?

I recently volunteered at the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) Women’s World Championship in Malmö, Sweden. Women’s hockey at it’s finest. And yet, there were hardly any people in the stands. Tickets were cheap (free in one of the arenas), there were activities, several games a day, and still no one seemed to care. It got me thinking about why this might be.

Team USA meets Team Russia on March 31, 2015. Notice anything missing? The crowd, perhaps? Photo Credit: Marcus Cederström

USA-Canada on March 28, 2015. Photo Credit: Marcus Cederström

USA goes up against Canada in the Gold Medal Game on April 4, 2015.Photo Credit: Ieva Kibirkstis

Here’s what I came up with:

1. It’s women’s hockey.

I’ve heard countless arguments for why women’s sports aren’t as fun or exciting as men’s sports. It’s not as fast. It’s not as aggressive. Women aren’t allowed to check. They wear facemasks, so it’s weaker.

The fact is, that’s blatant sexism and it’s ignorant. Seeing these games, I was thoroughly impressed. Not because it was women playing at a high level, but because it was high-level hockey. I like watching high-level hockey. It’s fast. It’s exciting. It’s physical. It’s fun to watch, especially when national pride is on the line.

These women are more than capable of skating well, of passing well, of hitting, and of playing hockey. To say that it’s not fun to watch is ignoring the fact that these women can play better than you or me. Because they are better. They practice a lot, and it shows.

While volunteering, I got a chance to see these women up close. Some of them are small, but they clearly make up for that on the ice, where their quickness and puck-handling allow them to get around defenders, make quick turns, and play well overall. Some of the women are bigger. Not fat or manly. That’s something people always assume – to be a good female player, they have to be built like men. When I say they’re bigger, I mean that they are muscular. They maintain a feminine form, but you can see that they are strong, especially with their on-ice physicality, speed, and endurance. They’re not built like a stick like so many unrealistic models we see in magazines. They are strong women. Period. It’s possible to be a beautiful AND muscular woman.

As for the facemask and no-checking rules that turns some people away for some reason, I tend to agree with the rules. Young girls are not going to continue playing a sport if they get hit in the face with a puck, or if they get checked into the boards. Some of them don’t like the physicality, others are turned away from it because their parents think it’s too dangerous. I’m not here to comment on the social norms that turn people away from allowing girls to be aggressive, but I will comment on the ability to garner interest in the sport itself. If parents don’t let their young girls play the sport, there will never be a future of elite women’s hockey. So, if you need to make a facemask rule to encourage young girls, do it. They need to be given the chance to play, and once they do, they will fall in love with the sport. Once they’ve gotten that itch to play hockey, there’s no turning them away from it.

That initial motivation is what it takes to get girls to take that leap. A purely research-based perspective tells us that motivation comes from different sources for boys than it does for girls. For girls, there are other things to consider when promoting a physical sport like hockey. For one, some girls want to be physical and strong, but there is a huge outside pressure to be beautiful (read: skinny), which doesn’t fit with hockey. How to do you fit those things together? By creating a motivational climate in which strength and fitness are the basis of beauty instead of beauty being the all-important goal, it is possible to get girls to understand that strength can be beautiful. The organizers of the tournament decided to give young girls the opportunity to learn to skate from some of the players from the Skåne regional women’s hockey team, which I think is a great way to build up this sort of climate. Introducing elite players to young girls puts a face on how real athletes actually look. It also allows them to see what hard work and motivation can do for a young player. Having a role model that inspires us allows an opportunity to strive towards a performance-related goal, as opposed to only wanting to win and look good doing it.

Another drawback of the perspective that women’s sports are inferior is the lack of funding available for marketing. Larger crowds draw in more money, but the budget of the tournament in Malmö did not allow for a lot of marketing to draw those large crowds. There were signs around town and they had some of the Swedish players come to open ices around Malmö to promote the tournament, but this didn’t bring as much attention as it could have gotten.

The organizers of the tournament decided to have some games in the most diverse area of Malmö (diverse here meaning non-native Swedish people that may not come from a hockey background). This was done on purpose. They were trying to bring the community around the arena in to show them that girls and women can still play sports at an elite level and to encourage young girls to learn to skate. There was a decent turnout, but evidently it wasn’t enough motivation to get them to go to games. Even though it was free. And for some of them only a short walk from home.

2. There is no number 2.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only reason people don’t want to go watch elite hockey that happens to have the word “women’s” in front of it. Maybe they’re afraid. Maybe intimidated by a woman that can do more with a stick than they can. People like the status quo and they don’t like challengers to this false ideal that they propose. The fact is that women are just as capable of elite sports as men and this is becoming more and more visible. As a person that loves sport and understands the benefits of it, I am willing to embrace this change and I hope that it continues. My life has forever been changed by my time as an athlete, and it would be irresponsible of me to deny anyone that same opportunity simply because “it’s always been that way,” or “women are too weak to play hockey,” or even better “women should be taking care of the kids.” Ignorance and fear are the only logical explanations I can see that would turn someone away from going to watch incredible feats of athleticism or denying people the chance to do the same.

As a sport psychologist, I am obligated to do whatever I can to encourage people of all ages, genders, sexual orientations, colors, creeds, and whatever else you fancy, to engage in some sort of physical activity. Challenge the status quo, if only to challenge yourself and see how much you can improve. I promise you, allowing progress into your life will only serve to make you a better person in all areas of your life.