Dealing with failure in junior elite beach volleyball teams: Why trying to help can make things worse

Performance in high pressure situations highly depends on how athletes respond to failure. This is particularly critical in dyadic teams, where the performance failure of one athlete immediately affects the entire team. In beach volleyball, where the performances of both athletes are highly interdependent, such failure may have even more extreme consequences. We explored how 23 junior elite beach volleyball athletes experienced team-related failure and how they coped with this failure under pressure by conducting semi-structured interviews and using Reflexive Thematic Analysis to analyse the data. Results indicated that individual performance failure of one athlete often seemed to trigger an attentional shift and increased perceived pressure in the teammate, frequently resulting in a subsequent decline in their performance as well. Athletes described emotional responses and both individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies as central to managing failure and preventing further performance deterioration. Notably, athletes tended to offer the type of support they themselves would have preferred in that moment, which was often perceived as intrusive or unhelpful by their partners. Ineffective regulation was described as an underlying mechanism through which an initial failure (e.g., loss of points) escalated into losing a set and, ultimately, the match and/or following matches. Applied implications include implementing a structured "teammate talk", in which athletes proactively discuss helpful and unhelpful support and regulation strategies prior to competition in order to prepare for critical performance situations.