Sidney Crosby is one of the greatest hockey players of all time — but he’s also worn the same jockstrap since high school.
Crosby’s convinced his non-negotiable pre-game rituals have played a role in his success, and many other athletes share a similar (albeit less extreme) belief in superstition.
These convictions may seem a bit absurd, but what if they actually work?
“There’s decades and decades of research showing that psychological influences have a certainly substantial weight in terms of maximizing performance,” said Dr. Desmond McEwan, an assistant professor of sport psychology in the UBC School of Kinesiology.
“It could be something around stress management [or] dealing with stressors that you’re facing as an athlete — if you feel like you’ve got the resources to deal with that, then you’re going to be more likely to be able to deal with the waves as they come.”
Delaney Woods is a fourth-year media studies and data science student who plays for UBC’s women’s rugby team. Rugby is more physically aggressive than other sports she’s played, so she needs to make sure she’s in the right mindset before a game.
“I need to dominate. I need to be physically aggressive. So I find, before a game, getting in the right headspace is critical for me to have a good game,” she said.
“If I don’t feel dialed or if I don’t feel like, ‘Okay, I can go out there and crush it today,’ it hugely impacts how I play.”
Woods follows a very specific routine to get in the zone.
Every morning before a game, she eats an everything bagel with cream cheese and jam, then heads to the field early to get herself set up. She pops in her earphones and puts on a specific playlist that differs drastically from her actual taste, with heavier artists like $uicideboy$ over her usual Hozier to “get angry.”
She braids her teammates’ hair, then does her own — always in the same style, because she had a good game the day she first tried it out and stuck with it ever since. She picks a set of spandex from her two that she wears “religiously.” Some of the people on her team wear their socks pulled up to a particular height or folded in a certain way.
When she gets on the field, she doesn’t step on any lines as she makes her way to the team cheer. During warm-up, she always works with the same partner — though she sees that not as a superstition, but as a way to control the level of intensity of contact drills.
Her former warm-up partner recently left the team, so Woods had to work with someone else.
“I switched partners. And then [in] the third game in the season, I hurt my knee ... I’ve been out for six months now with a knee injury, and I’m like, ‘Maybe not having the same contact partner did that to me,’” she said.
“Moving forward, I would love to be less reliant on needing the same partner and needing the same structure, but I’ve definitely made peace with the easier ones, like what [I’m] going to eat for breakfast, what song I’m going to listen to and how [I’m] going to wear my socks.”
Woods’s pre-game routine contains a mixture of superstitions and performance routines, which, for McEwan, “fall under the same umbrella of getting yourself in the right zone.”
“They’re largely around trying to manage stress, thoughts, emotions that we’re having, and trying to control the situation in some regard,” he said.
But although they are all actions that are routinely performed, McEwan differentiates performance routines from superstitions as those directly connected to improving skill execution.
Performance routines include strategies like visualization, specific warm-ups or positive self-talk. As McEwan puts it, these are ways to stay focused on yourself and “control the controllables,” instead of being anxious about external factors you can’t change or expect.
These routines focus on an athlete’s state of mind and body, and draw focus toward these things — superstitions, on the other hand, seem to turn to magical forces for luck.
“With superstitions, there’s still a general desire to get yourself in the zone, to manage stressors,” said McEwan.
“The key difference, though, is that it’s more of an irrational approach and more focused on [the] supernatural or the magic, basically the things that you can’t control .... It doesn’t necessarily help us with our skill execution directly.”
McEwan said that if superstitions appear to work, it’s probably a placebo effect, “but placebo effects are powerful, and they can be beneficial to people.”
But athletes shouldn’t rely entirely on superstition. The sense of security and stress management from a ritual may be helpful, but McEwan said these beliefs become harmful if athletes completely write off a game just because they can’t complete tasks that can’t be directly linked to their performance.
“That’s why we would probably emphasize and ... steer athletes towards focusing more on performance routines rather than superstitions,” said McEwan.
Woods credits her head coach Dean Murten with playing a huge part in helping her team feel organized and link their game performance to skills rather than luck. He sends out the run sheet the night before, and sets up the field ahead of time for the things they’ll be working on.
“He’s very structured that way, and I think that lends aid to us feeling confident in our performance and what we’re able to do, because he’s huge on controlling the controllables and having that set routine,” she said. “Having someone who cares so much about structure also plays into maybe having less emphasis ... on our superstitions.”
Superstitions don’t have to disappear overnight, but should be weaned into performance routines, according to McEwan.
“The good news is that there is evidence that we can change these [to] something that’s more adaptive and not going to then be harmful.”
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