IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Volume 23, Issue 11, Ver. 5 (November. 2018) 24-28 e-ISSN: 2279-0837, p-ISSN: 2279-0845. www.iosrjournals.org DOI: 10.9790/0837-2311052428 www.iosrjournals.org 24 |Page Pre-Competition Anxiety on Team Performance Perceptions: The Case of South Police and Dilla Kenema Supper League Football Clubs in Ethiopia Beyene Ali 1 , Dagne Getachew 2 & Sunil Kumar 3 1 (M.Sc. in football coaching candidate, Hawassa University, Ethiopia) 2 (Assistant professor in Hawassa University, Ethiopia) 3 (PHD in Hawassa University, Ethiopia) Corresponding author: Beyene Ali Abstract: The study aimed at to determine pre-competition anxiety on team performance perception of South Police and Dilla Kenema Super league football clubs. The study can provide psychological contribution towards football performance and a way to create a strategy for coaching. The design of the study was a descriptive survey research design and cross sectional study design was employed by 2017/18. Comprehensive sampling technique was drawn to take 50 players, whole population were taken because of the small number of the study participants. To determine the pre-competition anxiety, sport anxiety scale instrument was used to explicitly observe worry, concentration disruption and somatic anxiety with performance. Data were analyzed via mean, standard deviation, Pearson correlation and Independent T-test; in both descriptive and inferential statistics. The descriptive statistics shown that, Dilla Kenema Super league football club has technical ability than other performance perception. Whereas South Police super league football club has both technical and physical ability than other performance perception. Performance of both Dilla Kenema and South police super league football clubs cannot be affected by pre-competition anxiety. However worry is determined as one of the factor can enhance the performance of both Dilla Kenema and South Police super league football clubs. Key words: worry, concentration disruption, performance and somatic anxiety ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of Submission: 15-11-2018 Date of acceptance: 30-11-2018 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. INTRODUCTION Participants from interactive sports are overwhelming by pre-competition anxiety, which is psychological and physiological manifestation of the competitor. Anxiety has a negative emotional state, which can affect athlete’s performance by displaying cognitive and somatic anxiety [1] [2]. Cognitive anxiety is characterized by negative expectations and concerns, and worries about performance, inability to concentrate, disrupted attention, possible consequences of failure. [3] Proposed that cognitive anxiety is negatively related to performance – as cognitive anxiety increases, performance declines. It can be treated by sport psychologist and thereby to boost up or restore the performance of the players. However, a study by [4] found, several athletes reported that they needed a degree of cognitive anxiety in order to perform well. [5] Distinguished between two aspects of anxiety. When we are anxious, we experience the physiological changes associated with high arousal, including increased heart rate and blood pressure, ‘butterflies’ in the stomach, faster breathing. We call the experience of physiological changes associated with anxiety somatic anxiety (from the Greek soma meaning body). In agreement to the above literature, there are theories were developed concerning the constructs of anxiety, multidimensional anxiety theory. The inclusion of cognitive and physiological part of the athlete [5], his finding resulted there is a negative significant relationship between cognitive and performance. The same author found out somatic anxiety has displayed an inverted U relationship with performance. Even though there is such kind of outlook from the previous model; in contrary catastrophe model emanated with some extent there is an effect of anxiety and performance. Pre-competition Anxiety was considered one of the main psychological factors that influence performance. There has been a large amount of research concerning the multidimensional aspect of anxiety [5]. For the past 20 years, many researchers have done to find the effect of somatic and cognitive anxiety on athletes ’ performance. But the result was inconsistent. On top of that, majority of these psychological variables were conducted on elite players; ignoring less successful and amateur football players in Ethiopia. In addition to