Psychological resilience in sport performers: a review of stressors and protective factors

Psychological resilience is important in sport because athletes must utilise and optimise a range of mental qualities to withstand the pressures that they experience. In this article, we discuss psychological resilience in sport performers via a review of the stressors athletes encounter and the protective factors that help them withstand these demands. It is hoped that synthesising what is known in these areas will help researchers gain a deeper profundity of resilience in sport, and also provide a rigorous and robust foundation for the development of a sport-specific measure of resilience. With these points in mind, we divided the narrative into two main sections. In the first section, we review the…