Christopher J. Coady, Krista J. Munroe-Chandler, Todd L. loughead

Sport officials play a critical role in organized sport by ensuring safety, maintaining fair play, enforcing rules, and managing game flow. These responsibilities are often performed within complex, high-pressure environments characterized by time constraints, expectations of perfection, and substantial performance demands. As such, psychological excellence is essential for effective sport officiating performance. Emerging research suggests that the use of psychological skills is a promising avenue for enhancing sport officiating performance. However, the existing research remains nascent and fragmented across sports, competition levels, and regions, limiting a comprehensive understanding of psychological skill use across officiating contexts. The purpose of this study is to investigate psychological skill use among Canadian sport officials and explore whether skill use differs across key demographic and officiating characteristics. Using a cross-sectional survey design, officials will complete the Test of Performance Strategies-2 (Hardy et al., 2010) to assess the frequency of psychological skill use during preparation for and performance in competition. Descriptive analyses will be used to characterize the patterns of psychological skill use, and exploratory group comparisons will examine differences across demographic (e.g., sex, age, years of experience) and officiating characteristics (e.g., officiating type; MacMahon & Plessner, 2013). Findings will provide an empirical foundation for subsequent phases of the dissertation, which aim to co-create and evaluate a psychological skills intervention tailored to the needs of sport officials.