Importance Of Attribution Theory In Sport

The attribution theory is essential to coaching and understanding our athletes and their motivations. Throughout sports and competitive activities, individuals are determining whether the activity they are doing is a success or a failure. But the real question that needs to be asked is why are they attributing something as a success or a failure. What is guiding them to view something that can be as simple as getting out of bed in the morning as a success or failure? This paper will dive into why the attribution theory is so critical to coaching and how you can use it to guide yourself, your players, and your teams to become as successful as possible.

The attribution theory is important to us as a coaching staff because it will help to guide

We would like to do this by focusing on how our teams can improve and learn how to use the talent and hard work to achieve optimal performance from our athletes. This is because athletes need a stable cause to attribute their success to and we believe that our understanding of mistakes happening would help them realize the causes for their successes and failures are controllable and stable causes. They can be improved through practice, strategy and effort, and would likely be the same result in the future. The attribution theory is all about being able to attribute success and failures to a cause and through our understanding as coaches, that mistakes happen in life, we believe it would show them that the causes of their success/failures are stable and controllable, which in return would help to push them to reach their optimal performance potential. The following are examples of how the attribution theory would play into post-competition meetings with our athletes:

Play Well and Win - Girls Hockey

We didn 't play the way we wanted. Even though we struggled, we still did some things right. If we just focus on the things we did well like; boxing out, playing tough defense, and rebounding, we can work around those things and build up the things that needed to be worked on. I know that we can step up and play at a higher level. We just have to make some fundamental changes and work on some things in practice and I think that it will help in our next game. We can hold on to this loss for the night but when you come to practice tomorrow we aren 't going to hang on to this feeling we need to shake it off and start to prepare for our next game. We just need to use this game as an opportunity to see what we need to work on and build off of that. Once we improve what we need to, I think we can get to the level of success we want.” The attribution theory impacts how we speak to our team in the future by teaching us as coaches to be mindful of how we address and motivate, not only our team as a whole, but our players as individuals. This is important because as coaches, we want to inspire our teams and teach them to view their successes and failures through their own attributions, not to only base their success on outcome, but instead on their