Sporting Superstitions
Netball Umpire Kate McInnes-Hemsley always wears the same jewellery to a game, and it may actually make her a better umpire. Canta / Amy Riach.
Matilda’s Captain Sam Kerr has been wearing the same shin pads since 2007, Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka lines her water bottles up perfectly straight, and Olympian high-jumper Vashti Cunningham watches Kill Bill the night before every competition.
More than anything, athletes are known and celebrated for peak physical fitness and strength, but superstitions are a long held tradition in sports, and can have a tangible impact on an athletes’ mental-wellbeing and physical performance.
According to UC lecturer, and expert in the social-cognitive mechanisms of sport performance Brad Miles, psychology touches on almost every aspect of sport and superstitions can have a significant cognitive impact.
“What goes on in an athlete’s head plays a big part in how they perform,” Miles said.
Sports and superstitions often go hand-in-hand, but it’s a combination which has roots throughout the history of sport, according to anatomist Dr Brad Hurren, UC Team Lead of Blended Learning.
“So much goes into an athlete's performance. They practise, they train, and they work really hard,” Hurren said, and yet, many athletes, amateur and professional, stake the outcome of a game on how they tied their shoes that morning, what lucky meal they made for breakfast, or their innocuous game-day habits.
He told Canta many athletes have routines and patterns of behaviour, and even though some of them can seem weird, they are not considered superstitions – so what’s the difference?
The main distinction between the two, is that effective or habitual routines all have a defined connection between a behaviour, and the effect it is intended to have, like stretching the exact same way before every game.
Miles explained; “that is not the case for superstition, where the belief is that one event affects another without any clear rational or logical causal process.”
The superstitious culture of sport also has links to self-efficacy, according to Hurren, and superstitious practices often act as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, where an athlete who believes they will perform well, is actually more likely to perform well thanks to a renewed sense of control and confidence that Christchurch footballer Lucia Willis called “really essential.”
Long-time player for the Onehunga Football Club in Auckland, and semi-competitive player in Christchurch, Willis considers herself to be “really superstitious.”
She has more than a few good-luck rituals that she abides by religiously, for example like Cristiano Ronaldo, who always steps onto the pitch right-boot first, Willis always puts her right boot on first.
Even during the game, Willis is a superstitious player. Early in the match, she always shoots at the goal from down field: “knowing I’ll miss,” she told Canta.
“I’ll never get a goal off my first shot,” and now, missing once before she scores is an engrained superstition, which Willis adopted after one single game - two years ago.
“I shot 25 times and didn’t get a single goal. Now, I have to get my shitty shot out of the way.”
Hurren told Canta that although superstitions aren’t inherently a bad thing, they can escalate.
“Sometimes superstition goes from ‘if I do this, I’ll perform really well’, to ‘if I don’t do this, I’ll perform really badly,” he said.
Miles added: “[Superstitions] can sometimes be harmful, in extreme cases [they] may also create feelings of control, regulate stress and tension, and increase confidence – all things that are relevant to sports performance.”
Superstitions are very often viewed as irrational, or inconsequential, but they can have a tangible impact on an athletes’ anxiety, mental-wellbeing, and confidence, which in turn, has a significant impact on their performance. The deeply superstitious culture has an impact on coaches, referees, and umpires too.
Professional white-shirt umpire Kate McInnes-Hemsley wears the same jewellery to every single game, and even on her 8th season, she’s still convinced it makes all the difference. Hemsley is a qualified Christchurch Netball Centre umpire, and her jewellery is just as important to her routine as her warmup is.
“I always have to wear the same jewellery, and a lot of it,” she said.
Hemsley also wears the same hair-tie every single game, but it’s not for her hair. She wears the hairband over her hand, and switches it from wrist-to-wrist every goal, to keep track of which team gets possession of the ball.
“I will have a meltdown if I ever lose that hair tie,” she said. “I definitely play worse without my hair-tie and my jewellery.
“I would never dream of doing something different, just in case it made the whole game worse! What if I died.”
Even spectating sport, Hemsley has a ritual or two, and she’s always one to yell at the TV. She told Canta, “I have to tell them what to do, in case it makes a difference. They might hear me in Paris.”
Sports fans can be just as superstitious as the athletes they love, and Hurren called it a homage to their sporting idols. Miles agreed, and told Canta, that although fans have a very limited ability to influence what happens on the field, “they often engage in high levels of superstitious behaviour.”
Miles himself has a few spectating superstitions, and told Canta, “I do have a t-shirt that I like to wear when the All Blacks play – I’m pretty sure this t-shirt is lucky and makes a difference.”
Those superstitious traditions embedded in sport and spectating, are also reflected in sports betting; and Kristina Moore, a superstitious mum who works at a TAB Bar in Bluff, told Canta that the superstitious culture of sport influences New Zealand betting culture. According to Moore, many regular betters would only take lucky numbers, or would always bet on family names, or favourite colours, when they were included in the name of the horse.
According to a social gambling study conducted by the Qualitative Sociology Review, superstition in gambling provides the “illusion of control”, in much the same way that superstition in sport affords athletes a sense of control. Bishopdale bar manager Cordelia Jones told Canta, “whether they're superstitions or routines, people often find comfort in repeating patterns, especially if they had picked those numbers, names, or had made that one movement when they had won before.”
Lucky numbers are a common superstition for athletes themselves, as well as for those who bet on them, and Jaedyn Ellenbrook, ice-hockey player for the Canterbury Sharks has his own lucky numbers that he absolutely swears by. Ellenbrook told Canta, “I absolutely have to wear number 12. It's my number.
“I'm like Gollum with the ring, it’s mine!”
Every game, wearing his number 12, Ellenbrook also helps his goalie put his hockey jersey on.
“It's just kind of our thing”, he said.
“It's a mental thing, it's kind of comforting.”
Jaya Faith, a full-time dance student at Te Auaha in Wellington told Canta, “mental-health is really important for me as a dancer. I need to have a clear mind before performing; it means I can fully focus on the task at hand, and not be distracted.”
Faith has her own superstitions that help keep her calm, focused, and in a positive headspace.
“The night before a performance, I always have everything I need laid out perfectly, even if the performance isn't till the next night,” she said.
Christchurch cheerleader Dana Stamenkovic agrees, and said “having a strong and positive mental-health is important, not just in cheer, but in every sport. Sport can put a real strain on your physical health, especially high impact sports, which is why having a strong mental-health is important.”
“One explanation of superstitious behaviour is that it offers people a sense of control over a situation, even if that control is illusory”, explained Miles, and rituals and superstition are certainly not unique to sport.
“It’s pretty common in everyday life – think about everyday experiences such as people knocking on wood, having lucky or unlucky numbers, or simply crossing their fingers.”
According to Miles, some estimates suggest as many as 97% of people engage in some form of superstitious thinking or behaviour, but while superstition is certainly common, sport does provide a particularly good context for superstitious behaviour to emerge.
Miles told Canta: “It’s the athlete’s mental-state that then affects performance”; and sporting superstitions are a tradition that is part ritual, part placebo, and part effective, meditative, techniques.