A sport-psychological diagnostic examination of young EHF handball referees with a focus on mental skills

Abstract

The continuous improvement of handball referees’ performance, pushing physical limits, and the aspiration for ever-better results are some of the most important objectives of them. These may not be achieved barely based on innate talent and the acquisition of technical and tactical knowledge. It is just as important to understand mental processes and to be able to develop and support them professionally. Studying the cognitive skills of referees is especially significant in the case of sports requiring dynamic, complex, and open skills. Handball is one such sport where the environmental conditions require continuous adaptation and decision making. In our research we studied the above-mentioned performance indicators among young handball referees of EHF (European Handball Federation) using the relevant tests of the Vienna Test System (VTS). The main advantage of VTS is that it studies the competences of athletes objectively, providing a valid and reliable assessment tool. The paper explores the decision-making strategies of handball referees, the aspect of visual orientation performance involved in tracking simple visual elements in a relatively complex environment, furthermore their reactive stress tolerance, as well as their attention and concentration skills. This enables us to identify those referees who are capable of adequately managing stress and who can recognize opportunities and properly make use of them even under pressure. The aims of our research is to examine the specific sports-related skills of handball referees, to explore the relationship between competencies, to learn their cognitive abilities, and to focus on decision-making, situational-awareness and concentration. The aim of the study is also to open up a new way of objectively measuring cognitive abilities by analysing the performance of referees individually and then according to the position of peers.