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Anxiety was assessed in younger and older adolescent athletes in an attempt to test aspects of Hanin's zone of optimal fundon theory. S i -f i e participants in a track and field camp completed anxiety inventories at baseline and were instructed: 1) to recall how anxious they felt prior to their best performance and 2) to predict how anxious they would feel prior to an informal meet to be held 4 days later. Actual precompetition anxiety was assessed 1 h prior to the meet. Predicted precompetition anxiety was signifcantly higher than baseline and actual precompetition anxiety. Mean actual precompetition anxiety was not elevated above baseline. However, 34% (W65) of the sample experienced high levels of premmpetition anxiety, and the majority of these (17/22) reported performing optimally with high anxiety. Significant correlations between predicted and actual pmmpetition anxiety occurred for boys, but not for girls. The differences between predicted and actual precompetition values tended to be smaller in boys than in girls. Based on this sample, it is concluded that: 1) in accordance with the zone of optimal function theory, yuung athletes display considerable diversity in actual and optimal precompetition anxiety values; and 2) young athletes tend to ' overestimate the level of anxiety they will experience prior to an easy competi-I tion.Anxiety is widely regarded to play a major role in sport performance, and the most popular explanation for the relationship between anxiety and performance has been the inverted-U hypothesis (1-3).Although it was origiually conceptualized as a relationship between performance and arousal (i.e., physiological activation), the inverted-U hypothesis has commonly been tested in terms of anxiety rather than physiological activity. The inverted4 hypothesis indicates that performance should be optimized when an athlete has a moderate level of anxiety prior to competing and should worsen when anxiety either exceeds or falls below this moderate range. Thus, when performance is plotted against anxiety, an inverted-U function is d e m i d . The optimal midrange of anxiety is also regarded to vary as a function of the sport activity. In tasks requiring fine motor control and a small muscle mass (such as archery), a relatively low range of anxiety is considered best, whereas higher levels are beneficial for more gross motor tasks (such as field events) (2,3).The inverted-U hypothesis indicates that performance could benefit from increasing anxiety if it is too low. However, it is generally assumed that athletes more commonly experience excessive anxiety, and hterventions based on the hypothesis nearly always involve some means of reducing anxiety (4).

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