Satisfaction with life, anxiety, resilience, and sensation seeking among high and low achieving varsity athlets

This study aims to investigate how high performers and low performers differ in their life satisfaction, resilience, self-confidence and sensation seeking. The study is conducted among 30 state players and 30 national level players randomly selected from various institutions in Ernakulam Disrict, Kerala. The tools used in the present study are The Satisfaction with Life Scale by Diener, et al. (1985), Sport Competition Anxiety Test by Martens et al. (1990), Brief resilience scale by Smith et al. (2008), sensation seeking scale by Zukerman (1984) and social anxiety scale by Heidy & Kenneth (2000). Student ‘t’ test was done for finding out the difference between low and high performers. It was found that High performers have significantly higher levels of Satisfaction with life and Resilience where as low performers have higher levels of Social anxiety, and sensation seeking. There is no difference in the sports competition anxiety between athletes. This clearly implies that coaches and other significant people around them have to redefine motivational strategies on a long term basis as the athletes move from lower levels to higher levels of performance and efforts should be taken to reduce the level of anxiety experienced by athletes at the time of competition.