Intervention Tone and Coach-Athlete Relations

This report explores how players react to coaching behaviours, observing the intention tone of the coach. After categporising players into improvement bands, researchers observed autonomy support, evaluation climate and personal rapport using audio and video data. This evidenced that coaches take different tones with different groups of players, with higher achieving players experiencing higher levels of rapport. Although lower ability players received more individual attention from coaches, the tone was more controlling with more evaluation and encouragement. Rather than improving performance, the intentions of the coach were reversed, producing a negative developmental trajectory, sugesting the additional attention reinforced negative perceptions of one's ability, thus negatively influencing development. The document also explores the consequences of the research and includes suggestions for coaches to help them avoid negative development.