Perceived coach-created environment directly predicts high school athletes’ physical activity during sport

Abstract

Sport participation is an important means for adolescents to achieve moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), yet most high school students including athletes do not achieve the 60-minute daily MVPA guideline. As psychosocial factors influence athlete engagement and physical activity during sport, the perceived environment created by coaches could play a role in this influence. Guided by self-determination and achievement goal theories, this four-month prospective study examined the direct and indirect effects of perceived coach-created environment on high school athletes’ MVPA and sedentary behavior (SB) during sport. During the third to fourth week of a sport season, 225 high school athletes ( Mage = 15.24 years) completed a survey assessing perceptions of coach-created empowering and disempowering climates as well as psychological need satisfaction and frustration. Four months later, their MVPA and SB percentage times (%) during sport were measured using accelerometers. Path analyses partially supported our hypothesis, indicating significant direct effects of a perceived empowering climate on need satisfaction (β = .41) and need frustration (β = –.29), and direct effects of a perceived disempowering climate on need frustration (β = .38) and MVPA% (β = –.28). No significant indirect effects on MVPA% or SB% were found. Findings support and provide new insights into the important role of disempowering beyond empowering climates in predicting high school athletes’ PA. Specifically, when coaches display ego-involving and controlling behaviors, high school athletes may disengage during sport and achieve less overall MVPA. Further examination of these relationships using a longitudinal design across more diverse samples is warranted.

The relationship between motivation, perceived Motivational Climate, Task and Ego Orientation, and Perceived Coach Autonomy in young ice hockey players

“…We also observed a negative correlation between autonomy support from the coach and amotivation. There was, as expected, a direct positive (p<0.01) link between autonomy support from the coach and task environment [27,[42][43]. This indicates that coaches who give their players autonomy support have a better chance of creating a task environment, which encourages effort from the players.…”

“…Perceived autonomy support from friends is positively associated with identified regulation and intrinsic motivation [39]. Perceived autonomy support from exercise instructors positively predicts relatedness, autonomy, competence need satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation [27,42]. Research has demonstrated the value of perceived autonomy support from the coach and task-involving climate in predicting the intrinsic motivation in athletes [43].…”

Basic Psychological-Need Satisfaction and Thwarting: A Study with Brazilian Professional Players of League of Legends

“…Key Supporting Literature H1: Empowering climate is (a) positively related to psychological-need satisfaction; (b) negatively related to psychological-need thwarting [6,7,9,10,12,16,22,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] H2: Psychological-need satisfaction is (a) positively related to autonomous motivation; (b) negatively related to non-motivation [4,10,12,22,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40] H3: (a) Autonomous motivation is positively related to well-being; (b) non-motivation is negatively related to well-being [6,29,37,38,41,42] H4: Psychological-need satisfaction mediates the relationship between empowering climate and autonomous motivation [5,10,29,35,36,43] H5: Disempowering climate is (a) positively related to psychological-need thwarting; (b) negatively related to psychological-need satisfaction [5,16,44,45] H6: Psychological-need thwarting is (a) positively related to non-motivation; (b) negatively related to auton...…”

“…Sports-psychology studies have examined the usefulness of predicting motivational processes and associated outcomes of considering the coach-created motivational climate [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. These studies evaluated athletes from traditional sports like football and basketball, but recently a new type of athlete has emerged in video games.…”

The Basic Psychological Needs in the Classroom Scale (BPN-CS)

“…In order to measure both the satisfaction and the frustration components of the different elements that are part of the BPN, the main tool used is the Basic psychological need satisfaction and frustration scale (BPNSFS) [5]. This scale was originally created to be used in the adult population, and context-specific adaptations are available including the work-domain [26], sports [27][28][29], or physical education [30,31]. However, a more generalized adaptation to the school context that goes beyond a specific subject or area such as physical education is still to be developed.…”