Blog 20: Exit Interview

What is your essential question and your answers?

• How can a goalkeeper best avoid having a goal scored against her during a soccer game?
1. A goalkeeper can best avoid having goals scored against her during a soccer game by:
• being psychological prepared
• having tactical awareness
• and strong technical ability

What is your best answer? Why?

• Psychological Preparation
• The psychological aspect of the game is evident throughout every stage.  Goalkeepers need to be mentally prepared days before the game even starts.  Without the mind in the right place, mistakes are made that can lead to goals.  This preparation is also evident in the way goalkeepers handle mistakes and other mishaps during a game.  Without the right mind set and the ability to give themselves their own pep talk, there is no way a goalkeeper can prevent goals.

What problems did you face?  How did you resolve them?

• My main venue for independent components was dissolved due to an argument.  This caused me to panic about my Fourth Interview.  Luckily, I had already finished Independent Component 2, so that wasn’t the major issue, the only thing I had to solve was my Fourth Interview.  I had originally planned to interview the goalkeeper coach who warms my team’s goalkeepers up before games, but due to the argument I had with another coach I lost the contact.  I had no way of coming up with his information, I had to solve my problem, and quick.  With some deep thinking and a realization about the number of goalkeepers I actually know, I made a quick call and had my interview scheduled for the next day.  My problem was solved, and I may have been more successful with this individual than I would have been with my original choice in interviewees.

What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question? Why?

• Source 35: Mind Gym: An Athlete's Guide to Inner Excellence by Gary Mack and Davis Casstevens
• A eloquently written book about a sports psychologist’s experiences and the connections he’s made between what works and why.  This book housed the majority of the hardy information I gathered about the psychological aspect of goalkeeping.  This research is what drove me in my decision about making “...being psychologically prepared” my best answer.
• Source 49: The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance." Anticipation From Biological Motion written by Gabriel J. Diaz and colleagues
• This PhD dissertation perfectly explained the thinking behind goalkeeper’s decision making.  Although this was specific to penalty kicks, he broadened the findings to include other thoughts that goalkeepers run through when deciding what kind of save to make.  This article helped me with both tactical and technical, but mostly tactical.  The tactical argument he makes is quite thorough.