Table 3.

Practical implications & future directions.

Practical implications	Future directions
•Athletes competing in individual sports or sports where athletes are expected to reach their performance peak at an early age, such as gymnastics, may benefit from learning to use adaptive coping strategies [like problem-focused coping, seeking social support, or cognitive restructuring (minimizing threat)] (42) •In team sports coping effectiveness training programs combined with attention modification issues should be incorporated in the training of athletes to help them to better cope with and eliminate interference caused by competitive stressors and eventually achieve their best performance and protect their mental health (24)	•Development of stress management programs to help teams to collectively solve problems, to strengthen the mental health status of the whole team and to strengthen relationships under stressful conditions (23) •Exploring the coping process across a broader range of sports and participants to reduce athletes’ vulnerability to emotional abuse and any mental health impairments,
•Relationships between protective or immune resources such as the sense of coherence and the effectiveness of coping strategies to deal with stress in an extreme situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic should be examined in a more detailed way in the context of developing coping interventions in the context of elite sports (38)	•More research is needed to determine the underlying factors and antecedents that predict an athlete's coping preferences following specific types of stressful events and then to target meaningful and effective interventions to improve mental health and coping skills (26)
•Training adolescent athletes to use task-orientated coping might help them to deal with competitive anxiety in sport. •A supportive coach-athlete relationship is highly recommended especially if coaches want athletes continuing long-term competitive participation (34) •Assessing simultaneously the use and effectiveness of coping strategies to clearly disentangle the effects of the use vs. effectiveness of a wide variety of coping strategies	•Examining links between an athlete's coping style and their actual application of coping strategies following various sources of acute stress as a function of sport type (e.g., individual and team), skill level, gender, age, and culture with the help of longitudinal designs (48)