VR-MS - Mental Skills Training with Virtual Reality

Although elite athletes and coaches acknowledge that mental skills are central to fast-paced sports such as football, current training focuses primarily on physical skills and tactics. Recently, however, the value of mental skills training has been documented by scientific research and has started to be adopted by large football clubs. Still, mental skills training is yet to be widely adopted by football clubs, and especially those in smaller countries. The aim of the VR-MS project is to transform the training regime of Digenis Akritas Morfou (DAM), a second division football club in Cyprus, to include the exercise of mental skills. To do so, a small partnership is set up with (1) MentisVR Ltd, a company that develops Virtual Reality tasks for mental skills training in football, the Università degli Studi Gabriele d’Annunzio di Chieti-Pescara (UdA), an Italian institution with long expertise is sports psychology, and (3) The Centre for Social Innovation (CSI), a research and development organization which focuses on fostering social innovation that can bring about a positive change to local, national, regional and global contexts. The partnership will design and evaluate an innovative Virtual Reality program for the training of mental skills and apply it to the coaches and players of the club, starting with 6-year old players (of both genders) from the club’s academies and going up to professional players in the club’s elite men’s team. A set of guidelines for adopting the mental skills training program by other clubs and/or national football associations, will be produced and shared freely with the relevant stakeholders.