Abstract
Coach–athlete relationships are key to athletes’ well-being, development, training, and sports performance. The present study explored the effect of an evaluative conditioning (EC) intervention on the improvement of coach–athlete relationships. We applied a 6-week EC intervention to the athletes in a volleyball team with two of their coaches involved in the EC while the third coach taken as control. In the EC, we repeatedly presented the coaches’ facial images (i.e., conditioned stimuli) together with positively valenced pictures and words (i.e., unconditioned stimuli) to the athletes. The results showed that the EC intervention led the athletes to recognize their coaches’ neutral faces as showing more happiness, respond faster to coach-positive associations in the implicit association test (IAT), and give higher ratings to the coaches in the Coach–Athlete Relationship Questionnaire (CART-Q). The present study suggests that EC may be adopted as an effective intervention for coach–athlete relationships, altering athletes’ affective associations with their coaches to be more positive and improving their explicitly evaluation of the relationship.
Highlights
In sports, the quality of the coach-athlete relationship is of profound importance
In the present study, we conducted the intervention on the athletes in one sport team with some of their coaches involved in the evaluative conditioning (EC) intervention with the other coaches taken as control; we explored the effect of EC on coach–athlete relationships by testing multiple measures via varied procedures, including emotion recognition, implicit association test (IAT), questionnaires, face judgments, and physiological measurement
Athlete 2 exhibited an increase in the happiness rating for the two coaches involved in EC, while there was no increase in the happiness rating for the coach that was not involved in EC (Figure 3A)
Summary
The quality of the coach-athlete relationship is of profound importance It plays a central role in athletes’ psychosocial development and exerts major impacts upon their training, sporting performance, happiness, and welfare (Jones, 2007; Jowett and Shanmugam, 2016; Nicholls et al, 2017). A coach–athlete relationship is an interconnection of emotions, thoughts and behaviors between coaches and athletes (Jowett and Ntoumanis, 2004). The 3Cs model and its extension 3 + 1Cs model propose that the coach–athlete relationship includes four constructs: Closeness (emotions), Commitment (thoughts), Complementarity (behaviors), and Co-orientation. Co-orientation refers to coaches’ and athletes’ interpersonal perceptions regarding the quality of the relationship (Jowett and Shanmugam, 2016)
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