Identifying why some athletes give more effort than others, persist in the face of setbacks more than others, or stay committed to their sport and skills growth more than others is an important goal of sport psychology research and was the focus of this seminal study. The focus was on the specific problem of lack of clarity in existing research, connecting Dweck’s implicit beliefs theory with frequency of use of mental skills, sport enjoyment styles, resilience, and competitive motivational styles of an athlete. In this cross sectional study, data were collected from high school and college athletes in the southeastern United States. Participants completed the CNAAQ-2 (Biddle et al., 2003), the OMSAT3* (Durand-Bush et al., 2001), the CD-RISC-10 (Campbell-Sills & Stein, 2007; Connor & Davidson, 2003), the SEYSQ (Wiersma, 2001), and the CMSQ (Gut, 2010). The data were collected from the battery, evaluated for statistically significant relationships using a multivariate analysis of variance, and then used in a cluster analysis to reveal how groups vary across different psycho-social variables. Three of the four hypotheses guiding this study were supported, or partially supported, by the statistical analyses performed on the data obtained.