and athletes alike, its definition varies amongst them. A golfer may consider mental toughness to be the ability to focus while standing over a putt to win the tournament, while a boxer may view it as the ability to get up off the canvas to face more action after being dealt a punishing blow. A basketball player may consider mental toughness to be the desire to take the shot at the buzzer when the team is trailing by a point, while a quarterback in football may consider it his ability to execute a two-minute drive at the end of the big game. Examples abound, but so do the related questions: What is mental toughness? How do you get it? And why is it that athletes with comparable ability and training can speak to the value of being mentally tough, but differ greatly in their development and display of it? The answers to these questions are not easy to come by. Despite the frequent attention paid to the concept of mental toughness in sport, there is little agreement on how the term can be defined. This creates an inherent obstacle for all athletes seeking to enhance their performance in their given domain. There is an abundance of research and scientific inquiry on the design and implementation of physical skill training. Strength and conditioning programs are becoming routinely integrated into sports programs at levels ranging from professional to high school and even middle/elementary school programs. The benefits of such training are numerous, and include improved stability, flexibility, agility, speed, strength, and power (citation ?). All of which are known to have a positive impact on performance when trained and developed within the context of safe and appropriate programming (citation ?). Similarly, coaches frequently attend clinics and symposiums in order to both learn new skills and techniques to bring to their teams and athletes, and then also to teach and inform colleagues of their own skill training
refined and administered to a combination of high school and institute-based athletes in Australia (school-aged athletes: N= 438, mean age= 14.34; institute-based athletes: N= 392, mean age= 18.55) (Middleton, 2007). These samples, though large, do not indicate a distinction between different populations of elite versus non-elite athletes, and future testing of the MTI is required in order to whether the inventory does successfully discriminate between such groups (Crust, 2007). Another issue with the MTI is that it uses the 5-item per factor design (12 total factors). This results in a 60 item instrument, which is recognized by Middleton as a potential limitation in its administration, as athletes and practitioners would prefer a smaller, less test (Middleton, 2007). Crust (2007) also recommends that the MTI undergo additional analysis to include performance data and observational analysis to further test the construct validity of the instrument, as its initial analysis was based only on the self-report measures and correlates. There have been several other attempts at indentifying and measuring the concept of mental toughness; however they are all less scientifically sound than the MTI and MTQ48. For example, Davis and Zaichkowsky (1998) conducted a study of the perceived mental toughness of 38 professional ice hockey players. They defined mentally tough athletes as those who displayed a resistance to negative affect during adverse conditions in hockey. They had staff members (general managers, coaches, and scouts) rate each player on the following criteria designed to reflect mental toughness: 1) Adversity response 2) Over-achievement 3) Effort 4) Enthusiasm and 5) Skill. Their findings indicated that players with the highest levels of mental toughness showed more pessimistic explanatory styles (view outcomes as uncontrollable and