Why you Play the Game

              Anyone who has seen the movie, Miracle, remembers a line quoted by Jack O'Callahan saying, "Hey Coxy, why'd you wanna play college hockey?" to which he responds, "Isn't if obvious? For the Girls."  The movie, Miracle, is a recount of the 1980 US mens Olympic team who beat the Russians and went on to win the Olympic Gold medal.  For all hockey players it is a staple of their childhood watching and quoting this movie around the locker rooms.  What I never realized however, is that it also serves to the self-perception theory.  It has been twelve years since this movie first came out and now I find myself playing division 1 college hockey.  As many people know, the average college hockey player is older than the normal student body and often spend two or three years playing junior hockey before finally arriving to school as a twenty one year old freshman.  People see it as highly uncommon and a question that I get a lot is, so Nick, why did you wanna play college hockey?  

       As I take the time to think about this, I think back to all the hours I spent at the rinks growing up.  I loved hockey, all I wanted to do was be on the ice and when I wasn't I was usually out in my driveway playing street hockey.  All my reasons for playing, were intrinsic.  I played the game because I got pure enjoyment out of being on the ice.  However, as you get older and into high school and you start playing for a scholarship to college, your attidtudes tend to change.  An extrinsic motivatin starts to kick in.  Am I actually playing because I love the game or am I doing this to get a free ride to college and take a weight off my parents shoulder so they do not have to pay $60,000 dollars a year for me to attend a certain university or college?  When people ask me this question, my feelings about hockey become uncertain and i start to doubt whether I actually do play because I love the game.  

         In a study done, by Daryl J. Bem and H. Keith McConnell, volunteers of an intro to psych class filled out attitude questionairs about issues on campus.  They were assignned to two groups and one was told to write an essay from the no choice group where by students were told they had no choice over the courses offered on campus and the other group wrote an essay about whether or not they should have a choice. This experiment tested students attitudes and caused them to express why they felt a certain way.  They had to account for their own self-perception.  

     This assignment has taught me to look deeper into why I do the things that I do.  It shows the importance of self perception.  This theory helps you to take a deeper look into the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for why you do the things you think that you love to do.  But do you actually love doing them?

        

Bem, D. J., & McConnell, H. K. (1970). Testing the self-perception explanation of dissonance phenomena: on the salience of premanipulation attitudes. Journal of personality and social psychology, 14(1), 23.

Nick Finn