Investigation of the mental endurance of elite racket athletes

The aim of this study is to examine the mental endurance of elite racket athletes and to reveal the differences. The study was designed by adopting the general survey model from quantitative research methods. The sample of the study consisted of 216 athletes competing at elite level in three different racket sports such as table tennis, tennis and badminton. Personal Information Form and Mental Resilience Scale were used as data collection tools. As a result of normality assumption and reliability analysis, parametric analyses were applied at alpha=0.05 level. In order to examine the differences in the group averages of the variables, independent sample T-Test was used for variables with 2 groups and for variables with 3 or more groups One-Way ANOVA, scheffe and LSD Analysis from post-hoc tests were applied. Pearson correlation analysis was used to determine the direction and strength of the relationship between variables. No significant difference was found on the mental endurance of elite racket athletes participating in the study according to gender and marital status variables. On the other hand, it was found out that there was a statistically significant difference in mental endurance levels according to age variable. Moreover ıt was determined that the perceptions of elite athletes whose sport branch is tennis towards their mental endurance are higher than the perceptions of elite athletes whose sport branches are badminton and table tennis towards their mental endurance. It also showed that the Mental Endurance of national elite athletes was higher than that of non-national elite athletes. It was observed that there was a statistically significant difference according to the weekly training variable. In addition, it was determined that the mental endurance of trained elite racket athletes was positively higher, and as the competition experience increased, their mental endurance increased in parallel in a positive direction.