My Genus Hour Reflection 2

In this week's research I continued to look at the different ways female and male athletes differed in terms of psychology. In terms of psychological differences I found Women In Sport to have a good article examining the differences in brain make up and psychological responses. Their article gave tips for coaches to approach certain aspects a particular way in regards to emotional responses for female athletes. The article acts as a factsheet for coaches and is a great resource. The facts found in this article support previous information found in other sources I have looked at. Here are some ways female's actions and reactions differ from males:

• Their brain has a high level of sensitivity to stress and conflict 
• Women use different areas of the brain to solve problems, or experience and store strong emotions 
• Women have a bigger brain centres for language, hearing, emotion, and memory formation
• Men have larger processors in more primitive areas of the brain that register fear and trigger aggression 

Area of Differnce	Men	Women
Intellectual function	Analytical, focused, linear, logical perspective	‘Whole-brained’ perspective
Base reaction	Action	Feeling
Stress response	Fight or flight	Tend and befriend
Innate interest	Things	People
Survival strategy	Through self-interest, hierarchy, power and competition	Through relationships, empathy and connections
Mental preferences	Hard-wired to systemise	Hard-wired to empathise

I also expanded my search to include videos of interviews done by various coaches who have had experience coaching both male and females. One video I really enjoyed was an interview with Anson Dorrance, who is a soccer coach at the University of North Carolina. Dorrance is well known for his soccer program at the university, and working with soccer stars like Mia Hamm.He originally began as a coach for the men's soccer team at the university, but when they introduced a female team he became the head coach for both. In the interview he explains how he learned the various differences between coaching male and female's through a lot of error. His major message in the interview is that a coach needed a different platform for each sex. Dorrance found that he couldn't implement the same coaching practices, strategies, and game plans for both teams. He found that women lacked confidence, and therefore as a coach he had to alter the way he coached in order to foster their confidence. This meant that he would not show game footage to highlight mistakes, but instead show a high light reel. The opposite was true for the men's team, in that they were over confident, and as a coach he needed to highlight the areas or ways in which they could improve as players. I highly suggest anyone interested in coaching or sports watch the video, it is fairly short, but very interesting.

Moving forward, I believe I have collected sufficient information to do a TED talk and make my final presentation.

Here is a video of Anson Dorrance (University of North Carolina, Soccer Programs)