Effects of a concentration routine intervention on the performance of intercollegiate golfers

It was hypothesized that a concentration routine intervention would have a significant positive effect on the performance of intercollegiate golfers. A concentration routine consisted of a preshot and a postshot routine. In addition, this study predicted that a positive relationship would exist between routine execution and golf performance. The seven members of an NCAA Division I female golf team participated in this study. A one-way factorial design with repeated measures on multiple dependent variables tested the effects of the treatment among three time-frames. The three timeframes were: (a) Pre-treatment, which consisted of the four tournaments prior to the intervention; (b) Treatment-one, which consisted of the three tournaments immediately following the Introduction and Implementation Phases of the intervention; and (c) Treatment-two, which consisted of the three tournaments immediately following treatment-one. The results indicated that the treatment had a significant effect on golf performance. Subsequent discriminant function analyses and univariate F-tests revealed that scoring differential -- score minus the course rating -- contributed most to the difference in overall golf performance and exhibited a significant treatment effect. On the other hand, (a) percentage of fairways hit, (b) percentage of greens hit in regulation, (c) percentage of up-and-downs, and (d) number of putts per round revealed no significant treatment effect. A Least Significant Difference (LSD) post hoc test indicated that: (a) Scoring differential increased significantly from pre-treatment to treatment-one; (b) Scoring differential decreased significantly from treatment-one to treatment-two; and (c) Scoring differential decreased significantly from pre-treatment to treatment-two. A multivariate multiple regression found a significant relationship between routine execution and golf performance. The canonical correlation coefficient (Rc), combined with the canonical correlation coefficient squared (Rc2 ), revealed that a majority of the variance between the sets was shared. Additional canonical correlation analyses indicated that a portion of the variance in the individual measures of golf performance was explained by a linear composite of routine execution. Therefore, for this sample of golfers, it was asserted that routine execution was a significant contributor to golf performance