Poster 9: Hvordan optimalisere mental helse og livskvalitet blant kvinnelige fotballspillere på elitenivå?

The findings point to a need for coaches and support teams to focus on the players’ mental health and psychosocial well-being to promote individual and collective performance and to prevent drop-out.

Background: The well-known generic interplay between physical and mental factors has been increasingly acknowledged as important to achieving good performances in sports in general and within female football. However, compared with mental factors, strategies to improve physical performance may be easier to operationalise, and improvement may be easier to measure. This possible disparity may imply a risk of a lower priority to mental factors among coaches and within the support team. If so, this is unfortunate, given that athletes need to cope with high internal and external expectations towards peak performances. Moreover, in team sports like football, mental health and well-being is not an individual issue but encompasses interpersonal and team-relevant implications. To set trainers and coaches in the position to prioritise and focus, it is important to investigate what aspects of mental health and well-being are important from the athletes’ perspective. Purpose: The purpose of the ongoing study has been to explore what kind of mental health and well-being aspects are experienced as important for elite female football players.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews are conducted with fifteen professional female football players at an elite level in Norway and analysed by the systematic text condensation approach.

Results: The informants experienced that support teams and coaches focused on mental health and well-being was generally somewhat unsystematic and inconsistent. The informants voiced a need for coaches and teams to focus on 1) the players’ being emotionally connected to the club and bonding with teammates 2) the players’ need for emotional support during training and matches, and 3) the players’ total life situation. They highlighted that such needs may be accomplished in a mixture of individual coaching as well as in the building of a supportive club culture and using mental trainers with competence in sports psychology.

Conclusions: The findings point to a need for coaches and support teams to focus on the players’ mental health and psychosocial well-being to promote individual and collective performance and to prevent drop-out.