An Investigation of the Coaching Behaviours among Singapore Coaches

Journal of Pbysical Education & Recreation (Hong Kong) VoL 7 No. I

Ian R. Haslam Dan E. Smith

School of Physical Education,
Nanyang Technological University, SINGAPORE

Abstract:
Athletic performance is the result of interactions among the athlete, coach and performance environment. Each of these factors is critical to performance outcomes. This study is designed to improve our understanding of these interactions, with a focus on coaching in Singapore. Salmela (1996) and colleagues (Cote & Dowd, 1996; Cote, Salmela & Russell, 1995 a, b) recently conducted an in-depth and extensive research project on Canadian expert coaches. The results have provided a knowledge base grounded in coach's realities. The qualitative data gained from expert coaches has lead to the development of a questionnaire, the Coaching Behaviour Scale (CBS) aimed at assessing coaching behaviours from the athletes perspective. Preliminary tests of the Scale reveals most of the subscales to have a high degree of internal consistency and that the factor structure approximates the original theoretical framework. These are preliminary findings and there is need to develop the scale further. The purpose of this study is broadly two fold. Firstly the study will contribute to the on going validation of the CBS developed by Cote and Yardley from Brock University in Canada secondly, it will serve as a preliminary study of the coaching behaviours and overall coaching characteristics of Singapore national coaches.

Conclusion:

This on-going project will essentially provide international
data to help the validation of the CBS for use across all sports
and on an international basis. As the study is still incomplete,
only preliminary data could be presented at this time, based
on an n = 105 national level Singapore athletes. The demographic
data revealed a disproportionately large number of male over
female coaches who would be worthy of consideration by NSA's
in Singapore. There are perspectives and expertise to be derived
from coaches of both gender which suggests a greater effort
on the part of sports policy makers to develop females elite
coaches.
This paper was limited to a discussion on only three of
the CBS scales, mostly because of the time constraints but also
because the project is still underway and comparative data from
coaches in other countries was unavailable at this time. The
athletes perception was that coaches fairly often worked on the
athletes mental preparation for sport competition. This was a
little disconcerting in view of all the efforts the Sports Council
has made in recent years to promote this training domain. It
is clear more work needs to be done with coaches so that whenever
they coach a national team they always promote the use of
systematic PST. It was interesting to note that goal setting was
a separate scale in this questionnaire when many sport psychologists
view goal setting as a part of an athletes overall mental preparation.
Similar descriptive data was evident in the goal setting scales
as was demonstrated in the mental preparation. That is that coaches
only 'fairly often' encouraged goals setting with their athletes,
not always! Haslam & Song's (1997) work could suggest why
this might be the case in their study of coaches in extra curricular activity program in Singapore schools and the concerns of teacher/coaches. In short, coaches were concerned about the consequences
of formalizing a PST program generally. It might mean they
have to learn new coaching strategies and there is no guarantee
that their efforts will be rewarded by enhanced performances.
It was more encouraging to note that the 'competition strategies
scale' did profile higher than the other two PST scales. We
were hesitant to build too much into this as it could have been
that athletes were thinking more about the coaches role in the
dressing room before and during the actual game. This is a
little different than the PST definition of competition strategies
which tends to view competition strategies on an individual athlete
basis. Athletes make notes of events, and feelings as well as
behaviour designed to counter distractions to performance before,
during and after the event.