Abstract
The demand on athletes to perform optimally during competition usually creates pressure. Thus, athletes who demonstrate competence during practice sessions, but fail to perform at similar levels during the contest are often said to experience choking. The study adopted a pretest-post test, control group randomized experimental design with a 3x2 factorial matrix. The study involved fifty-six elite and non-elite athletes, consists of 36 participants from the team sports and 20 participants from the individual sports. Two instruments were used to recruit choking-susceptible athletes: Self-consciousness Scale (?=0.77); State Anxiety Scale (?=0.75). While Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (?=0.76) was used to collect data. Two hypotheses were tested at the 0.05 level of significance. Data were analyzed using Analysis of Covariance There was significant main effect of treatment on choking-susceptible athletes (F (2, 55) =3.29, p<0.05). Sport category had no significant main effect on performance. The team sport athletes obtained a higher post test performance mean score (X=33.56) than their Individual sport counterparts (X=32.40).The result shows that the team sport had a slight mean value margin than the individual sport on performance score. Therefore, the two psychological strategies are recommended as control measures against pressure on athletes. Sport psychology experts should be attached to all sports group to help athletes develop awareness on controlling choking effects. Key words: Choking-susceptible, University elite and non-elite athletes, PsychologicalstrategiesAcknowledgments: I would be glad to be at the conference to present the paper.