The coach can have a profound impact on athlete satisfaction, regardless of the level of sport involvement. Previous research has identified differences between coaching behaviour preferences in team and individual sport athletes. The present study examined the moderating effect that an athlete's ...

Across a range of youth sport contexts, early specialization (i.e., intensive engagement in a single sport from an early age) has been associated with a variety of negative outcomes such as burnout, injury, and premature sport attrition. Accordingly, researchers and health practitioners have...

Youth sport coaches play an important role in shaping the sport experience and positive development of youth athletes. One salient approach to examining how the interpersonal behaviours of coaches influence young athletes has been through the lens of leadership theories. However, there is limited...

The purpose of this study was to examine the birthplace and relative age effects in National Football League (NFL) players. The place and date of birth of NFL players in the United States were analyzed with Monte Carlo simulations to determine if either factor was predictive of the probability of...

In this study, we assessed whether contextual factors related to where or when an athlete is born influence their likelihood of playing professional sport. The birthplace and birth month of all American players in the National Hockey League, National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball,...

Objectives: Coaches are a primary influence on athletes' development in youth sport (Horn, 2008). However, the intervention tone of coaches' behaviour has not been directly observed. The purpose of this study was to examine associations between the intervention tone exhibited by youth sport ...

Objectives: The purpose of the current study was to explore parent-athlete sport-related conversations as they naturally occurred in the private contexts that surround youth sport. A secondary aim was to understand whether male and female guardians communicate differently in sport, and whether...

A common practice in sport is to play-up youth athletes who are highly skilled against chronologically older peers. However, the potential effects of playing-up on youth's athletic and personal development have not been explored. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate athletes'...

Objective: Models of sport development often support the assumption that young athletes' psychosocial experiences differ as a result of seemingly minor variations in how their sport activities are designed (eg, participating in team or individual sport; sampling many sports or specialising at an...

Background: Studies suggest that expert performance in sport is the result of long-term engagement in a highly specialized form of training termed deliberate practice. The relationship between accumulated deliberate practice and performance predicts that those who begin deliberate practice at a...