Jordan Sylvain Lefebvre

Previous research has underscored the influence of positive coach-athlete relationships (i.e., interpersonal interactions) on athletes’ psychosocial outcomes (i.e., improved social skills, team cohesion). Extant literature also highlights that reflective practice enables coaches to critically evaluate their experiences, leading to improved decision-making, greater adaptability in various sporting contexts, and more particularly, enhanced interpersonal relationships. Despite such benefits, traditional coach education programs overemphasize professional knowledge (i.e., technical and tactical skills) at the expense of interpersonal and intrapersonal development. This chapter introduces an evidence-based tool to facilitate self-reflection to enhance coaches’ interpersonal skills that integrates coach leadership and coach reflection literature.

The past few decades have seen an abundance of mentoring research across many disciplines, including sport coaching. Despite this, mentoring scholars have been advocating for alternative conceptual approaches, including the developmental network perspective. Accordingly, the purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the research on mentoring and developmental networks in sport coaching. This chapter begins with the traditional understanding of mentoring in sport coaching that includes informal, formal, and virtual forms. The second part discusses the developmental network perspective, including how and why it was proposed as an extension of mentoring. This section includes an overview of dyadic, triadic, and polyadic relationship structures that can make up a developmental network, as well as the social network principles involved in developmental networks and the research in sport that uses this approach. Lastly, this chapter concludes by offering future directions for sport coaching research in this domain.

Parents play a central role in children’s ongoing participation and enjoyment of sport. Despite compelling evidence that parental behaviour can undermine the quality of children’s experiences in sport, little research has examined whether strategies to support parents to engage in positive sports parenting behaviour are effective. In this paper, we report two studies that had the overall aim of developing, implementing and evaluating a program designed to promote positive parental involvement and improve spectator behaviour in junior rugby league in Australia. Study 1 involved the development of a prototype version of the program, named Play Well Triple P, which was qualitatively evaluated through interviews with 19 parents about their satisfaction with the program. In Study 2, we used feedback from Study 1 to refine the program and develop a pilot version, which was then evaluated in a quasi-experimental feasibility study with 101 parents (mean age = 38.42 years; 72% mothers) of junior rugby league players. The pilot version involved one interactive online module and text messages to reinforce content and prompt strategy implementation across the season. Participation in Play Well Triple P was associated with increased positive sports parenting behaviour and reduced controlling and intrusive sports parenting behaviour, with a trend towards reducing over-reactive parenting practices at home. These findings are discussed in relation to the feasibility of implementing a brief and engaging sports parenting intervention in the context of a broader integrated system designed to facilitate ongoing participation of children in sport.

The past two decades has seen an emergence of literature to support that coaches’ implementation of transformational coaching behaviours is associated with a number of athlete developmental outcomes in youth sport. More recently, scholars have advocated that coaches can learn to improve their use of transformational coaching in order to foster these developmental outcomes. To this end, the purpose of this chapter is to outline how coaches can monitor and improve their implementation of transformational coaching behaviours. First, this chapter discusses the theoretical and conceptual foundation of transformational coaching within the full-range leadership model. Second, the chapter provides an overview of the Coach Leadership Assessment System (CLAS), along with the research that uses this assessment tool to observe transformational coaching behaviours. Given that the CLAS is a comprehensive observational tool primarily designed for research, the third section of this chapter proposes and describes a simplified Global Rating scale adapted from the CLAS (CLAS-GR) that can be used by coaches, practitioners, and sport organisations to observe and monitor coaches’ leadership behaviours. In addition, this section suggests various complementary mechanisms wherein coaches can learn to improve their implementation of transformational behaviours, such as the use of mentoring relationships as an educational tool. Lastly, this chapter provides considerations for researchers and practitioners in the context of youth soccer.

In partnership with the Canadian Mental Health Association, Ontario Division, the purpose of this study was to conduct a post-season evaluation of the effectiveness of a mental health and suicide-awareness program called Talk Today, delivered to elite adolescent male hockey players and their support staff. The study was conducted using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design that began with a quantitative phase followed by a qualitative phase. In total, 105 participants (49 athletes, 56 staff) completed online questionnaires and 12 (6 athletes, 6 staff) participated in qualitative interviews. Results integrated quantitative and qualitative findings to examine participants’ perceptions of acceptability of the program, acquisition and application of knowledge, and perceptions of stigma following the program. Findings revealed that 78% of athletes and 90% of staff reported high levels of satisfaction with the program, 85% of athletes and 87% of staff felt they acquired knowledge on mental health including access to resources, and 68% of athletes and 87% of staff felt they could provide more effective support to individuals with mental health issues. Participants felt the program helped them to identify, approach, and support someone experiencing mental health issues. Additionally, participants reported lower levels of personal stigma in comparison to levels of public stigma towards persons with mental health problems. Overall, results suggest a high level of openness to a mental health and suicide-awareness program among elite male adolescent athletes. Given that this group typically holds negative attitudes towards mental health, these findings are promising for the future implementation of such programs.

Coaches strive to create a cohesive group structure that promotes athletic and team performance. One way to accomplish this is by establishing group norms as they have been shown to facilitate group member interactions and improve team performance. Despite evidence indicating that norms play an important role in shaping team dynamics and outcomes (e.g., team culture, cohesion, communication), there is a lack of resources for applied practitioners, particularly coaches. The purpose of this article is to synthesize literature on group norms and present practical considerations for coaches to better apply group norms in sport.