Introduction: Youth sports are often viewed as a way for athletes to develop a healthy lifestyle and various skills. However, this is not always the case, and participation in sports can sometimes have a negative impact on young players' growth. To understand how athletes handle competition stress, it is essential to examine their perceptions of physical, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive stressors, as well as the coping strategies they employ to manage them.
Purpose: This study aimed to provide a framework for understanding how athletes evaluate stress before a competition and how stress relates to cognitive appraisal, sport confidence, and performance expectations.
Method: The participants were 327 male youth athletes, aged 15-19 years (M = 16.90; SD = 1.00), who competed in the Portuguese National Football League and completed a questionnaire 24 to 48 hours before their match, using the critical incident methodology. The evaluation protocol included the Questionnaire of Competitive Stressors in Sport, the Primary and Secondary Cognitive Appraisal Scale, the Sport Confidence Inventory, and the Sport Performance Perception Questionnaire. Path analysis was conducted to test the conceptually proposed mediation models.
Results: Results revealed that opponents were the main source of stress for athletes and that the more athletes stressed about their opponents, the more they tended to perceive the situation as threatening (and less challenging), the lower their perceptions of coping and sport confidence, which, in turn, predicted lower expectations of individual and collective performance.
Conclusions: Perceiving stress as a challenge or threat impacts the confidence and expected performance of young athletes. Our study supports previous findings on stress adaptation and offers insights for coaches and sports psychologists. Changing athletes' perceptions of competition through questioning and restructuring their thoughts can help them develop more adaptive thinking during high-pressure, stressful situations.