Due to the fact that the team is not in a hockey league at the moment, they play friendlies every Sunday morning against local sides instead – which can also mean that sometimes the children are playing against friends as well as with them. Because the players are around 11 means that a lot of them will still be relying heavily on their aerobic energy systems as opposed to their anaerobic systems, which has severe implications for training. The coach can easily remedy this however by including only a couple of anaerobic drills into the training, with the majority being aerobic in order to keep the children motivated and compensate for their age.
In an effort to maintain the player’s motivation, the coach awards a man of the match award to the player that he feels has helped the team the best throughout the match. Also he awards a trophy for player of the month to the player who has tried the hardest in both training and matches. This also reinforces the coach’s transference of effort as behaviour onto the children as praise and rewards are given to those who try the hardest. The coach does also notice that each player has a different ability and so grades the effort that they apply individually so as to make it fair.
2.2 Coaches Behaviour
This section is focussing on the way that the coach can interact with the players in his charge and so promote the desired behaviour from them. There are many different aspects to coach’s behaviour, primarily the way that they act and speak around the athletes they are coaching. Because of the age of the junior hockey team the language that the coach will use will be very different to that they would use if coaching adults, e.g., they will not swear at the children and also they will use less technical language so as to ensure the children’s understanding.
Another aspect of a coach’s behaviour will be their use of both positive and negative feedback, coupled with rewards and punishment. Feedback is the way in which a coach will try to ensure that the behaviour and actions carried out by the players is desirable by explaining why the have done something right or wrong. It is more likely that they will be rewarded for playing or training well and punished for doing badly and failing to meet the expected standards of the coach.
The main ways in which a coaches’ behaviour will affect an athlete’s performance and behaviour are:
- Players that receive a reduced amount of instruction will not improve to the same degree as other individuals.
- The athlete’s self-confidence and motivation will decrease if the coach does not pay them enough attention
- Amount and frequency of corrective instruction after an error may tell the athlete the coach’s opinion of their ability (Meyer, 1982)
3.0 Feedback
There are a number of different types of feedback although the two most common ones are positive and negative feedback. One definition of feedback is:
“Information about an interaction with the world through our visual, auditory, tactile/kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory sense modalities, and this information as usually against our prior learning and experience before being interpreted as either positive or negative” (Cross & Lyle, 2001).
This definition provides an efficient and specific definition for feedback as it incorporates all of the factors naturally used in the processing of the environment. Honeybourne et al, (1996) prefer a much simpler definition, which states feedback as;
“Using the information that is available to the performer during the performance of a skill or after the response to alter the performance.”
This definition is much broader than the one put forward by Cross and Lyle (2001), because it lacks any amount of specificity, whereas the first definition explains succinctly what feedback is and how it is obtained by the performer. The coach in this assignment praises performances he deems desirable and so motivates the performers to replicate this behaviour in front of him, by his use of feedback.
It is important to distinguish the coach as a participation coach, in contrast to a performance coach (Cross & Lyle, 2001) as regards to this assignment. This means that he is more concerned in the player’s participation and enjoyment rather than with the results achieved by the team. This is important as it can have severe consequences in terms of the feedback provided to the players, the participation level of the players and in turn the level of motivation that each player has. Because the coach’s main focus is on maintaining the player’s level of participation and so putting a greater emphasis on fun in order to attract new players, his system of coaching will fit more acceptably into the participation aspect of coaching and not the performance aspect, which is predominantly focussed on success at all level, achieving goals and gaining any extrinsic rewards possible.
Feedback has many different aspects, which can all have varying implications on the behaviours transferred to the players by the coach. The following definitions are adapted from Honeybourne et al, (1996).
3.1 Positive Feedback and Reward
Positive feedback is where the coach will praise athletes for working hard and playing to the best of their ability. If a player makes a mistake than the coach will not say a word and the player will know they have done wrong.
Rewards can take many forms such as simply praise from the coach ranging right through to money and trophies for winning e.g., player of the month award. However reward can also involve being let of a punishment for instance not having to do press-ups if you made a mistake (missed-placed pass) because you only did it once.
3.2 Negative Feedback and Punishment
Negative feedback is where the coach will make a comment if you make a mistake but not if you do something well i.e. it is the removal of an unpleasant stimulus.
Punishment also has a wide range that it can take from having to do press-ups or runs right through to being dropped from the starting line up to the bench or being removed from the team entirely. If you are playing sport for money it can also include being docked wages. Many clubs at amateur level are now instigating a fines system for wearing incorrect kit so as to ensure that it does not happen again.
However the money collected from these fines are often then spent on a tour for the team at the end of the season as a reward.
3.3 Other Forms of Feedback
3.3.1 Continuous Feedback
Information obtained throughout the skill performance through proprioception and kinaesthesis. I.e. when taking a shot at goal and the stick doesn’t feel right, it is possible to predict that the shot will miss solely because of this feeling.
3.3.2 Terminal Feedback
Information provided after the skill performed has been completed. I.e. “Good attempt Mat, try and aim more into the corner next time.”
3.4 Which is Best?
The main question is which of these feedback mechanisms is best to use when coaching young performers? In order to promote self-efficacy in his players, the coach of the junior hockey team will use a lot of positive feedback during game situation while he is more likely to use a lot of negative feedback in his training sessions, as the children need to know where they are going wrong and to enable them to improve. The term negative feedback is not always mean that the comments made are of a negative content, rather it is more constructive criticism – used as a tool to facilitate improvement in the individual. The methods of feedback used by the coach are supported in a study by Wandzilak & Ansorge (1988), who found that in training there were proportionately more organisational/instructional comments as opposed to a match situation in which more encouraging remarks were made.
The use of terminal or continuous feedback is wholly dependent on the situation in which the player is involved – more complex skills demand continuous feedback due to their complexity, whereas terminal feedback can be made after more simple or learned skills. The coach in this assignment has learnt the differences in these types of feedback through a practical background and so although he understands the theory behind these differentiations in feedback, he doesn’t realise why they are necessary, and this seems to be all too apparent in today’s coaches. For instance, although all coaches are now filtered through screening programmes to judge their suitability with children, not enough training is then given to these coaches for them to prepare the athletes suitably for performance-based sports (Smith et al, 1984). In general it is deemed best to use appraisal and positive feedback in order to improve the athletes motivation (Lacy & Darst, 1985; Rupert & Buster, 1989), although this is more of a guideline when working with children and so should not be taken as a written rule.
To ensure mistakes in skill replication are kept to a minimum when teaching children, it is much more suitable for the coach to adopt an authoritative style of coaching. This takes a lot of decision making out of the children’s hands and therefore reduces a lot of spontaneity in the playing styles of the performers (Liukonnen et al, 1996).
4.0 Motivation
Motivation is a major factor in determining both the level at which children perform in a sporting environment and whether they participate or not at all. There are many factors that can affect motivation such as the level of arousal, the difficulty of the task and the perceived ability to do the task. The way in which a coach uses feedback can have major influences on an athlete’s motivation and participation, especially at a young age. We are in a sense discussing motivation when talking about the way in which a coach provides feedback, in that encouragement and criticism are classified as secondary motivation. It serves a purpose to motivate the player to replicate or reject a skill based on the coach’s view of how well it was performed.
The Drive Reduction Theory is one method of describing motivation. This theory proposes that a state of need leads to a drive state (an unpleasant state of bodily arousal), and so this drive state activates a required behaviour that reduces the tension caused by the drive state. (Gross et al, 2000). To place this in a sporting context, the need to accomplish a skill provides an arousal (anxiety that the individual can’t perform the skill), which then bring outs the behavioural response (performing the skill) and the arousal disperses accordingly. The coach of the junior hockey team uses a variety of methods in order to motivate his team – i.e. positive feedback, extrinsic rewards and goal setting. This is to enable the coach to try and get the most out of them technically, whilst still maintaining a sense of fun and excitement in the sporting scenario.
However if a coach constantly praises someone than it may lead to the team not caring if they get praised because they will see it as worthless and so not be as motivated to play or train as hard as they can. This can also be affected by a coaches use of negative feedback as in if a child perceives their coach to always be punishing them, or telling them their doing something wrong then this may result in them not wanting to bother playing for this coach.
This is why although a coach should try and be positive when coaching children, they must vary the way that they use feedback and so maintain a good relationship with the children to ensure that the right result is achieved.
5.0 Discussion
The coach of the junior hockey team has been trying to find a variety of ways in which to motivate his players throughout this assignment. By trying to keep the fun in the games and drills, and administering extrinsic rewards he has helped keep the squad occupied, interested and helped to promote a feeling of companionship which has given them a feeling of acceptability in the group. This has meant that the squad has been able to start off as a team just interested in playing together, and progress towards becoming better technically (Harter, 1978), achieve success on a more frequent basis and above all become better motivated to stay in sport longer. Due to the fact that extrinsic rewards will start to become more appealing to the children as they go through their teenage years, this can lead to serious problems for the coach because sometimes they can come at the expense of fun. This in turn means that the coach would have to adapt and develop more of a performance coaching basis, rather than being a participation coach, which according to Cross & Lyle (2001) are two completely separate entities with no similarity between them at all. However this is a couple of years away and so does not need to be covered in this discussion. In order to help stimulate his players into improving the feedback used by the coach in a match situation was mainly positive (supported by Wandzilak & Ansorge) – this is mainly due to the fact that instructions to the players would have been detrimental to the enjoyment of the players on match day. Another reason for this is because immature minds find it difficult to focus on more than a limited number of things at a time and providing them with a number of different instructions would ultimately cause confusion for the players. Positive feedback was an easy way for the coach to help override this confusion, with a simple Stimulus – Response effect taking place. This effect occurs on an almost subliminal level.
Another way in which the coach could try to maintain the player’s motivation would be to set them goals. This could create a sense of excitement in the team because the players would feel more wanted due to the fact that each goal is individual. To make this work though the goals set would have to be enjoyable and achievable by that child. Also the more technical aspects of the drills could be satisfied if the coach uses positive rather than negative feedback, although this does go against the findings of Wandzilak & Ansorge (1988).
The main thing that the coach has to be aware of throughout though is that he is letting the children have fun and not try to coach them as if they are adults.
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