The Personal Development Of Coach-Athlete Athlete: Personal Relations

Coach-athlete partnership

The personal relationships in a sport context like athlete-partner, coach-athlete or athlete-family, are very different from most of other types of work due to the particularity of athletes. Generally, they have to get alone closely with partner and coach in most of the time every day in order to build up tight relationships and sync the minds to strive toward the goal. Among these relationships, the coach-athlete partnership is considered the most crucial one on affecting performance in terms of the field of psychology (Serpa, 1999). This relationship can be represented as a complex coaching process that, if it is effectively establish, provides the means for coaches and athletes to express and fulfil their needs

(Jowett & Cockerill, 2003; Jowett & Meek, 2000) while an ineffective relationship is composed by remoteness, antagonism, deceit, exploitation etc. (Balague, 1999; Jowett, 2003) For example, some psychologists conducted an interview in 2007 to examine the coach-athlete relationship (Gould, Lauer, Collins, and Chung, 2007). All interviewees are football coaches from American who received awards of facilitating the personal development of their athletes. In the interviews, all of them value communication over punishment and criticisms that direct to the personalities or characters. They particularly emphasize the importance of effective communication that shows they trust, respect and care about the athletes as people they love. The result is consistent with the relationship maintenance strategies of Stafford and Canary (1991) which emphasize positivity and openness, and the research of Coatsworth and Conroy (2006) that indicates the coaches who are always supportive and encouraging are likely to have a positive impact on the development of their athletes, especially for those who lack of confident about themselves (Smith & Smoll,