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Feltz's Research Breaks New Ground Deb Feltz’s fascination with sport psychology began as a collegiate skier at Colorado State University, and has evolved into a distinguished scholarly career focusing on self-confidence and how it can affect athletic performance. Feltz, who received her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University, joined the faculty at Michigan State University in 1980 as an assistant professor and member of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports. Over the years, she moved up through the ranks to associate and full professor and in 1989 was appointed chair of the department. Throughout her tenure, Feltz has maintained a focused research agenda as well as a commitment to outreach and service. Feltz is a sport psychologist, an area of research that has burgeoned since the 1960s. The field focuses on the various aspects of sports participation and the mental issues that affect performance, such as concentration and motivation as well as anxiety and confidence. Feltz has specialized in the area of motivation and self-confidence. Some of the pioneering work she has done involves the motivations of young athletes. In the 1980s, she documented the reasons why children get involved in youth sports, and what causes them to drop out. What she found was that the reason young people said they became involved in sports were related to the reasons why they quit. She said children became involved in sport because they wanted to have fun, but found practices long and boring. They joined to be with friends and make new ones, but found very little opportunity to socialize. She also discovered that youth wanted to improve their skills, but felt they weren’t improving and weren’t as good as their teammates. That work then led her to do research on young runners. "That was the first time we were able to take a look at the same kids over a 5-year period," Feltz said. "It was longitudinal rather cross sectional study to find out how commitment to running changes. How does their anxiety change? Do the kinds of worries change? "What we found was that they did lose a commitment to the sport over time and the girls who started out with more commitment also lost more than the boys. But we really didn't find a sense of burnout. It was simply that after five years it did get old. There were still some positive benefits to their participation. Perceptions of social and physical competence was much higher for the runners than for their nonparticipating counterparts." |
Feltz also has been an important voice in the debate involving the theoretical understanding of self-confidence as it relates to sport and performance. The debate has pitted a school of thought that argues that emotions like anxiety and avoidance influence self-confidence and performance and those who believe that self-confidence is merely a by-product of anxiety reduction. Feltz’s research has yielded a respecified model that acknowledges the central role self-confidence plays in athletic or physical performance, but also incorporates past performance as an important influence that can become more important as a task is repeated. "I think my work has shown that lack of confidence leads to the anxiety, rather than vice versa." Feltz has used her respecified model to create interventions to help people gain confidence in a variety of sports skills. Meanwhile, her outreach and service efforts have included more than 200 presentations at coaches’ clinics – many of them through the Youth Sports Institute -- on topics ranging from motivating young athletes and understanding competitive stress to maintaining discipline and communicating with parents. Through it all, she has placed great importance on mentoring graduate students, many of whom have gone on to have important research careers. It is a role that she takes seriously. "I believe that it is my job to mentor graduate students and my job doesn't stop until I help my doctoral students get a job and get tenured." For her, the department has been a perfect fit with its strong overall interest in youth and sport. As department chair for nearly 10 years, Feltz said the work has been challenging and rewarding from a research, teaching and service perspective. "Our department has historically had a strong emphasis on development issues in motor performance," she said. "And there is nothing in the country like the Youth Sports Institute. So I’m very proud of our strengths in research and the students we have produced."
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