Pinoy sports psychologist lauded

A Filipina pioneer in the relatively new field of sports psychology continues to gather accolades in the United States, bringing more honor to the country in a profession that combines athletic ability and brains. Sheryll Casuga’s dissertation entitled “The Filipino Athlete’s Experience of the Bahala Na Attitude in International Sporting Competition” was given the distinction of “Outstanding Dissertation Award” by the John F. Kennedy University faculty (nominated) & Research Director (picked) for the 2011 graduating batch. She started her research in 2009.

“The idea for this research was conceived after the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2008 US Open 9-ball Championship,” Casuga said in an exclusive interview with The STAR. “At highest forms of international competition there appears to be some form of “choking” involved, as if the high-level athlete is not able to cope with the demands of high-stake competition, which prevents the athletes from executing their sport skills optimally.”

Casuga, who earned her degree in Sport Science from UP Diliman in 2003 before moving to the US, considered the culturally unique fatalistic attitude of Filipinos as a coping mechanism in high-pressure situations in sports. She returned to the Philippines in April of 2010 to interview elite national athletes about how “bahala na” (sort of a Filipino version of “que sera, sera”) came into play when they were competing. Eleven high-profile athletes whose names cannot be revealed took part in the study.

“Filipino athletes are very skilled and talented; that’s why they go far in competition, but why then can’t they seal the deal most of the time?” wondered Casuga, who also worked as a certified personal trainer and sport fitness specialist at the University of California San Francisco. That’s definitely due to psychological/mental factors. The statistics show otherwise, how we don’t have Olympic gold medals as much as our contemporary nations and how our stats in international sports are low. Manny Pacquiao is amazing but he’s only one man. We need more champion athletes. My earlier hypothesis was that in order for Filipinos to excel in international sports, they need to cope better.”

In September of 2008, Casuga received the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) Student Diversity Award, perhaps the first Filipino to receive the award for the breadth of her research in sport psychology. She has also been personally involved in trying to get support from universities in the Bay Area for Filipino athletes who are hoping to train there, representing them as a trainer.

Casuga has made several attempts to solicit support from government agencies and private donors for her studies since 2008. She has gradually been receiving recognition for her work, which is a relatively unrecognized field in the Philippines, and has received technical help from experts she has contacted in the US. Her ultimate goal is to bring all her learnings to the Philippines, and help Filipino athletes break the unseen psychological barriers that hold them back from being the world’s greatest athletes.

Since sport psychology is quite new and in many ways a foreign concept to Filipinos, Casuga decided to look at the Filipino cultural values that interact with high-level sports performance. To do that, she revisited the “bahala na” attitude. She admits that it was hard to get athletes talking about this topic at first, due to the stigma associated with it. But her determination has led to substantive discoveries and shed new light to the reality of how “bahala na” is experienced by most people.

In the qualitative study using Conventional Qualitative Content Analysis, Casuga personally interveiwed the cream of the crop of elite international Filipino athletes from a wide range of sports. She also made sure there would be diversity in terms of age, gender, cities or provinces where they grew up, and even years of schooling. She says her findings completely change the dictionary meaning of “bahala na” from a negative value to an adaptive and facilitating coping strategy.

The American Psychological Association (APA) selected Casuga’s dissertation to be presented at the 2011 APA Convention in Washington, on Aug. 7, under Division 47: Sport and Exercise Psychology as part of their 25th anniversary as a division of APA, which is a great honor, and a great honor as the Philippines receives recognition in a new field associated with sport.