Competition anxiety and archery score: Rhyme 2025

Two hundred and seven Malaysian archers from fourteen states, competing at the SUKMA national games and the AUG university games, filled in the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 and were followed over a 72 arrow round with a maximum of 720 points. More anxiety went with fewer points: the correlation is minus 0.55, at p below 0.001.

The scale separates three components, measured on four levels. The highest is worry, the insistent thinking about how it will go (mean 2.56, standard deviation 0.73), followed by concentration disruption (2.41 and 0.73) and somatic anxiety, the signs in the body (2.22 and 0.69). The authors name worry and concentration disruption as the two components that weigh most on low scores, and say the picture is the same in both competition circuits.

On the scores themselves the information stops at the distribution: among the SUKMA archers it runs from below 500 points to above 650, and among the university archers the scores are spread much the same way, with the best reaching the same levels. The comparison between the two groups shows no difference.

That is everything the document contains: a one-page extended abstract, with a scatter plot and no tables.

The sample was chosen purposively rather than drawn at random: 207 archers from fourteen Malaysian states, entered in the two national circuits. Anxiety was measured with the Sport Anxiety Scale-2, a questionnaire with a four-point scale that yields three separate scores, worry, concentration disruption and somatic anxiety. Performance is the competition score over 72 arrows, collected during scoring events.

The link between the two is expressed as a single correlation, minus 0.55, together with a scatter plot and a trend line. Nothing else about the method is described: not when the questionnaire was filled in relative to the competition, not the distances or the format of the round, not the age, sex, level or bow division of the archers, not the reliability of the questionnaire on this sample, nor even which kind of correlation was computed. The three component scores and the competition scores are not cross-tabulated anywhere.

This is a conference extended abstract, two pages including the references, with no DOI. There is no table, no analysis beyond the single correlation, and the statements about the weight of worry and concentration disruption are not backed by figures in the text: the two highest means do not establish that those are what brings scores down, because the three scores are never related separately to the competition. The record is short because the document is short.

The design is cross-sectional, and a correlation on its own says nothing about which way the link runs: an archer who shoots badly may worry more, as well as the other way round. The Sport Anxiety Scale-2 measures the tendency to be anxious in competition, a trait rather than the state on the day, and when it was filled in is not stated. Without the archers' age, sex and level there is no telling whom the result applies to, and the purposive sampling ties it to the two Malaysian circuits.

One of the six references is incorrect: Lim's 2018 study, also in this registry, is attributed to the Journal of Physical Therapy Science with page numbers that do not belong to it, when it appeared in the Journal of Exercise Nutrition and Biochemistry. The document itself carries two different dates for the colloquium, 5 and 6 September 2025 on the title page and 5 and 6 February in the footer.

For an archer there is one useful point: across 207 competing archers, those who reported more competitive anxiety had on average lower scores over 72 arrows, with a link of moderate strength. It does not say by how much, it does not say for whom, and it does not say that working on anxiety would raise the score, because nobody was followed over time and no intervention was tested.

The detail worth taking away is the order of the three components: worry, the turning over of thoughts before and during, comes out higher than trembling and the other signs in the body. That is a group average on a four-point scale, not a description of any one archer, and the highest component is not thereby the one to tackle. In this registry the source counts for the size of its sample, 207 archers, and for little else.