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.”

They used a Coaching Efficacy Scale and Revised Leadership Scale for Sports in which One Hundred and Seventy-Two sports coaches completed. “Coaching efficacy predicted perceived leadership behaviors comprising training and instruction, positive feedback, social support, and situational consideration.” While these findings do allow for some solidification on the importance of coach education to increase effectiveness as a coach, they leave question as to whether differences in levels of educated coaches pertain to the educational organization or simply the individual coaches’ personalities.
When it comes to the methods of this research conduction, the one hundred and seventy-two coaches are distinguished as sixty-two community coaches and one hundred and ten competitive coaches.

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

course.
The procedure of this article consisted of contacting te coaches through email. They were “sent through regional or provincial sport governing bodies on behalf of the researchers.” Though it is unknown how many coaches actually received and read these “recruitment emails,” the 172 of them provided informed consent prior to completing the initial questionnaire for partaking in this study.
In result, the data collected showed that coach education, indeed, did affect efficacy in a significant manner. “Furthermore, coach efficacy predicted perceived leadership behaviors of training and instruction, positive feedback, social support, and situational consideration.” (Table 2). This quote helps solidify that the hypothesis was somewhat supported, though the “competitive context” constructed by the conductors, did not significantly predict coach efficacy especially.
The overall study was conducted well, but should have been more thorough.

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

thoroughly.