Coaching Context

The article I chose to reflect on is titled “The Relation of Coaching Context and Coach Education to Coaching Efficacy and Perceived Leadership Behaviors in Youth Sports.” It was conducted by Philip Sullivan, Kyle J. Paquette, Nicholas L. Holt, Gordon A. Bloom, and was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 2012. The entire study was released through The Sport Psychologist, a literary informative available in hard copy as well as online through The Human Kinetics Journal. The purpose of conducting this study was to compare how the level of coaches education correlated to their efficacy as coaches and their coaching context, as well as how that “efficacy was related to perceived leadership behaviors in youth sports.”

The targeted group of coaches were those that coach children from ages 12-16 because of the influence made on children in this adolescent stage as well as the children’s involvement in both competitive sports and the community. Though there was a criterion of the age group of participants, the actual sports context was not controlled in this study. The ratio of male to female coaches in their respective groups both roughly simplified to about 3:1. Meanwhile the sports that were sampled only included basketball, swimming, golf, ice hockey, baseball, and sledge hockey. Also, experience was not necessarily a criteria because the coaches ages themselves ranged from 16 to 70 years old with as little 2 years to as much as 45 years. However, 35% of community coaches and 91% of competitive coaches claimed to have completed a coaching certification

Due to a lack of specifics or existence of a personality scale, we are left with a “speculative” and more vague sense of what causes such differences on coaching styles and efficacy. I feel things such as playing experience from the coaches themselves, experience as a coach in terms of duration should have been stricter, and the ever-looming unknown that is personality. Individuality will always be an uncontrollable factor in any situation, and in this study the variable is no different. Background information is essential to how coaches relay their messages to their players because something as simple as how they grew up in their own household or were treated by their coaches when they were younger could/would change everything about how they coach themselves! Lastly, I feel it was an extremely large mistake to leave out football as a part of this study. Even if it is a gender-biased sport, if it was available in the location of this study, it was absolutely necessary because football is possibly the number one sport that develops and implements the sense of discipline. Overall, the study was well conducted with results that supported the hypothesis, however, it could have been conducted more