Baseball Coaching Info

Coaching Behavior Part IV: Putting It All Together

The previous three articles in this series dealt with various types of coaching behavior athletes liked or disliked. This final installment will deal with what you do with all this information and some concluding thoughts.

Finding Out What Your Players Need

Trying to take all this information and apply it to your situation may be difficult. Many factors such as player personality, environmental demands and coaches’ demeanor play a role in the overall interaction between players and coaches some of the guess work is to conduct a . A suggestion to alleviate conference with each of your players at the beginning of the season. At these conferences you can discuss:

1. Realistic goals and how you can achieve them together.
2. What role the athlete sees him/herself playing.
3. The player’s and your expectations for the season.
4. What the player needs from people around him/her by asking such questions as:

• “What do you need from the coaching staff?”
• “What motivates you?”
• “What gets you out of a blue funk?”
• “When you are having a bad day, what do you need from your coaches and teammates?”

I have found these questions to be a very effective springboard in finding out the needs of players.

These interactive conferences help the player and coach understand how each views the other and what can be expected in the future. Follow up conferences, in the middle and at the end of the season, are also helpful in examining whether goals are being met, how effective the coaching staff is, and where improvements can be made.

Conclusions

Using this information, to bring your athletes’ preferred coaching behavior and the actual behavior, you produce, closer together, can lead to greater athlete satisfaction, team cohesion and overall productivity. All teams and individual athletes are slightly different depending on various conditions, such as age, gender, personality and environment. Each situation should be looked at uniquely, but the guidelines above can help in a general consideration of interaction between players and coaches. Remember that you need your players to win and your players need you to improve. Only through this fine working symbiotic relationship can you achieve success.

References

Chelladuraia, P (1984). Discrepancy between preferences and perceptions of leadership behavior and satisfaction of athletes in varying sports. Journal of Sport Psychology, 6, 27-41.
House, R.J. (1971). A path-goal theory of leader effectiveness. Administrative Science Quarterly, 16, 321-328.
Martens, R (1990). Successful Coaching. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Schliesman, E.S. (1985). Relationship between the congruence of preferred and actual leader behaviors and subordinate satisfaction with leadership. M.S. Thesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Willis, C. (1994). A study on the relationships among group cohesion, leadership behavior and athlete satisfaction. M.S. Thesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.