Keywords

1 Introduction

Currently, participation in sports has become a major activity for young and adult athletes. Their participation provides many opportunities such as enhancing their sports skills, gaining new experiences, and also developing social skills among themselves. The most important factor in helping them to be successful in sports activities is the individuals who serve as coaches. Coaches can be considered as individuals who can influence athletes in their lives and sports performance [9]. Furthermore, they also can positively affect the behavior and psychological state of an athlete. Becoming a coach is an important and a challenging role, as their responsibility is not only teaching but also guiding athletes to succeed in their sports performance.

One of the key elements to be a successful coach is through their perception of their ability to lead the athletes through the competitive experience, and the belief in one’s personal ability is known as self-efficacy [7]. If a coach has a low level of self-efficacy, it may have a detrimental effect on athletes’ performance. Conversely, if the coach has high self-efficacy, it may help in influencing his or her own performance, as well as the athletes’ performance during training and competition. Past studies have also shown that athletes were also more confident in themselves and their teams when they believed their coach was a confident leader. There are numerous studies on coaches’ level of coaching efficacy in various sports environments [7]. Throughout these studies, there were many factors that were revealed to have an effect on the coaches’ level of coaching efficacy.

Lack of numerous factors, such as how to teach technical skills and various methods of motivation, may impair the coach’ beliefs in their ability to guide their athletes, and hence, it will affect the leadership abilities of current and future athletes [11]. In the sports context, understanding the coaches’ beliefs in their competence to lead and guide individual athletes as well as their teams during competition may continue to be superior [4]. Coaching efficacy can be divided into four types of subscales: motivation efficacy, technique efficacy, game strategy efficacy, and character-building efficacy [14]. Motivation efficacy can be defined as the coaches’ confidence in their ability to influence his or her athletes’ psychological state and skills. Technique efficacy refers to the coach’s belief on his or her ability to teach skills and to diagnose and correct the errors made by the athletes. The third subscale, which is game strategy efficacy, represents the coach’s belief in leading the athletes to perform successfully during competition. The last subscale, which is character-building efficacy, involves the coach’s ability to affect the athlete’s attitudes such as sportsmanship and positive attitude.

Many factors affect coaches’ coaching efficacy, including their playing experience and coaching courses attended. In Malaysia, there are three levels (level 1: beginner; level 2: intermediate; level 3: advance) of coaching courses conducted by the National Coaching Licensing Board that can be attended by all sports coaches. Besides serving as a national standard for the recognition of coaching qualifications, the program provides systematic coaching education with the purpose of improving the knowledge and skills required by sports coaches. The program has three basic components: sports science, specific sports coaching, and practical components. Every coach who attends this course must go through all the components before they can be certified. Although there are many studies that measure coaching efficacy, most of these studies were based on a Western context. Limited information is available on the coaching efficacy among Malaysian coaches, particularly in youth sport. Therefore, this study was conducted to gather more information with regard to Malaysian youth coaches and their coaching efficacy. The purpose of this study was to determine significant differences in the level of coaching efficacy among individual and team sports coaches in Malaysia.

2 Methodology

2.1 Participants

A total of 154 coaches from 14 states who coached in Sukan Malaysia (SUKMA) 2012 volunteered to serve as participants in the study. These participants were selected through a purposive sampling comprising of both individual and team sports (athletics, aquatic, weight lifting, badminton, gymnastic, hockey, lawn ball, archery, tenpin bowling, sepak takraw, volleyball, equestrian, and boxing). They were categorized into individual (N = 77) and team (N = 77) sports coaches.

2.2 Outcomes Measure

The coaching efficacy scale (CES) [7] questionnaire was used to measure their coaching efficacy. The reliability of the CES questionnaire in this study was 0.91.

3 Results

The following analyses were based on the result from social science statistical package version 17. Descriptive analysis such as frequencies was calculated to demonstrate the characteristics of coaches. Table 1 shows that the majority of respondents for both groups are male (individual = 49, team = 56). Furthermore, the majority of coaches in both groups were in the range of 41–45 years of age (individual = 23, team = 22). In terms of education level, the majority of coaches in both groups have a diploma (individual = 37, team = 32).

Table 1 Gender, age, and education level among individual and team sports SUKMA 2012 coaches
Full size table

Majority of coaches had experience playing at the state level, regardless of their category of coaching (individual = 47, team = 39), while only eight individual coaches had experience playing at the national level and 26 team coaches had experience playing at the national level. Furthermore, the findings showed that 81.8 % (N = 126) of the respondents have attended the coaching courses organized by the Malaysian Sports Council, while 18.2 % (N = 28) of them did not attend any coaching courses organized by the Malaysian Sports Council. The majority of coaches who had attended the coaching courses had attained the intermediate level of coaching (individual = 28, team = 26) (Table 2).

Table 2 Level of playing experience and coaching course attended among individual and team sports SUKMA 2012 coaches
Full size table

The means and standard deviations of each subscale in the CES questionnaire, which includes motivation, technique, game strategy, and character-building efficacy, are presented in Table 3. Malaysian SUKMA coaches who coached individual sports had higher mean scores in four efficacy subscales, which are motivation efficacy (M = 7.86, SD = 0.58), strategy efficacy (M = 7.78, SD = 0.61), technique efficacy (M = 7.90, SD = 0.63), and character-building efficacy (M = 7.91, SD = 0.62), compared with coaches who coached team sports. Coaches who coached team sports showed lower mean scores in motivation efficacy (M = 7.69, SD = 0.51), strategy efficacy (M = 7.66, SD = 0.57), technique efficacy (M = 7.61, SD = 0.65), and character-building efficacy (M = 7.78, SD = 0.57). The results indicate that Malaysian SUKMA 2012 coaches who coached individual sports were more confident in handling tasks such as motivating their athletes, detecting the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing teams, carrying out the instructional aspects of coaching, and developing their athletes’ characteristics.

Table 3 Coaching efficacy among individual and team sports SUKMA 2012 coaches
Full size table

An independent-samples t test was conducted to compare the level of coaching efficacy and the subscales (motivation, game strategy, technique, and character building). There was a significant difference in scores for coaches who coach individual sports technique efficacy (M = 7.90, SD = 0.63) and team sports (M = 7.61, SD = 0.65; t (154) = 2.78 p = 0.006, two-tailed). The magnitude of the differences in the means (mean difference = 0.29, 95 %CI 0.08–0.49) was small (eta-squared = 0.05). There was also a significant difference in overall coaching efficacy scores for coaches who coach individual sports (M = 7.86, SD = 0.55) and team sports (M = 7.68, SD = 0.51; t (154) = 2.08 p = 0.04, two-tailed). The magnitude of the differences in the means (mean difference = 0.18, 95 %CI 0.01–0.35) was very small (eta-squared = 0.01). This indicates that coaches who coached individual sports, in contrast to coaches who coached team sports, are hypothesized to be more effective in correcting and providing skills and techniques to the athletes. Furthermore, in overall coaching efficacy, coaches who coach individual sports tend to have higher efficacy in coaching compared with coaches who coach team sports.

4 Discussion

Coach acts as the most important person who has responsibility to ensure their athletes’ success, influencing the athlete’s mental development, self-esteem, and skill satisfaction in sports performance satisfaction. The CES measurement developed by Feltz has been widely used in past studies to measure the confidence or efficacy level among school and collegiate coaches [7]. It measures the coaches’ efficacy in carrying out duties based on the four subscales of coaching tasks, which are motivation, technique, game strategy, and character building. Coaches who have a high degree of coaching efficacy do give a more positive feedback. In addition, when compared to past studies [8, 10], the overall coaching efficacy score for both groups of coaches was high (Malaysia {individual 7.86, team 7.68}, [8]: 6.72). It was evident that Malaysian youth coaches showed similar capabilities in coaching and had the same potential as others to be successful coaches, regardless of the type of sports they coached. The Malaysian coaches believed that self-confidence in coaching is important to inspire athletes’ performance during competition. The findings of the present study are supported by past studies, which indicate that Malaysian coaches were confident in their ability to handle coaching tasks [2, 12]. The level of coaching efficacy produced positive outcomes, and this was considered to be aligned with the difficulty of tasks [14].

The findings also showed that coaches who coached individual sports had higher scores in motivation, game strategy, character-building, and technique subscales compared with coaches who coached team sports during the SUKMA 2012 event. It was also mentioned that getting a group of athletes to perform as a team is not always easy [1, 5]. Rather, a group of athletes becomes a team when they all possess a common identity, have shared goals and objectives, exhibit structured patterns of interaction and communication, and most importantly consider themselves to be a ‘team.’ These issues raise difficulties for coaches who coached team sports and try to make them united and perform well as a team. The role of the team coach is very different compared with one-to-one coaching, and when a team coach is also part of the team, they have to take the role of coach and player simultaneously. This requires the ability to handle complex relationships and a high degree of self-awareness to make the coaching effective [1, 5].

It has been mentioned that coaches who have higher coaching efficacy were significantly linked to technique, game strategy, motivation, and character-building efficacy. Other studies have also shown that highly efficacious coaches often displayed more positive coaching behaviors, offered more positive reinforcement and instruction, displayed more commitment to coaching, and were more likely to increase player satisfaction levels, performance, and team’s winning percentages. Positive reinforcement, for example, can influence the athlete’s confidence in their ability to achieve their goals, which can in turn influence the level of effort expended to achieve those goals [7]. It has been highlighted that coaches who were less educated in pedagogy, kinesiology, or exercise physiology that specifically addresses the training requirements of children and adolescents make them less confident in coaching athletes. Therefore, these elements need to be mastered by the coaches of team sports to help boost their efficacy level in motivation, technique, game strategy, and character building.

Coaches of individual sports with a higher coaching efficacy in character-building subscale suggest that they were more inclined toward carrying out character-building duties and were more efficacious in handling tasks of instilling positive attitudes such as respect for others, fair play during competition, and also instill good moral character [8], because the coaches believed that inculcating a positive attitude toward sports in their athletes will result in successful performance. Furthermore, they also reflect efficacy in carrying out tasks such as instilling an attitude of fair play among athletes, instilling an attitude of respect for others, promoting good sportsmanship, demonstrating the skills of the sports, and instilling an attitude of good moral character. The coaches who coached individual sports have to deal with individual athletes that vary in attitudes. Therefore, they need to convey various types of character-building strategies to athletes with different attitudes.

One possible reason that Malaysian SUKMA coaches who coached team sports had low mean scores in game strategy efficacy compared with coaches who coached individual sports might be due to limited games and matches being organized that expose coaches to the real competition environment and use their ability in making decisions during competition. Furthermore, the SUKMA event is organized only once every 2 years, which gives little opportunity of exposure for coaches to guide their athletes in real game situations [13]. In addition, most of the youth athletes involved in team sports came from schools where most of the time they were being supervised by school coaches [6]. The Malaysian SUKMA coaches were only able to be with their athletes during centralized training just before the event. Due to the short duration of centralized training, there is limited contact between coaches and their athletes. Therefore, coaches have to look for other ways to improve their game strategy efficacy. For example, coaches may have to organize more competitions or friendly matches in increasing their team performance so that they can practice their game strategies [3]. Further research is paramount to expanding the understanding of coaching efficacy in this environment. However, this study has provided additional knowledge of coaching efficacy related to Malaysian youth coaches.

It was evident that the coaches who coached individual sports demonstrated a higher coaching efficacy level compared with coaches who coached team sports. Under the guidance of efficacious coaches, young athletes can learn the technical and tactical skills of a sport, gain confidence in their physical abilities, develop leadership qualities, and work toward a common goal. This study only examined the antecedents of Malaysian SUKMA coaches and did not investigate the impact of the coaching efficacy dimensions. Past studies had already noted that coaches who had high coaching efficacy used more positive coaching styles, had more players who were satisfied with their playing experiences, had higher winning percentages, and had higher efficacy levels among athletes and teams [2, 9]. Therefore, it would be interesting to examine these variables on Malaysian coaches to determine whether the outcomes were similar.

5 Conclusion

This study has successfully demonstrated that Malaysian SUKMA coaches have a high level of coaching efficacy to coach youth athletes. Their level of coaching efficacy was primarily determined by their playing experiences and coaching courses attended. Measuring coaching efficacy is important because it does not only provide a direct impact on coaching behavior, but also include positive and negative influences that a coach may have on character and athletic development as well as performance of individuals and teams. This study has provided a foundation to build a body of knowledge on coaching efficacy that is related to the Malaysian environment.

In conclusion, coaches who coached individual sports demonstrated a higher coaching efficacy level and technique efficacy subscale compared with coaches who coached team sports. Under the guidance of efficacious coaches, young athletes can learn the technical and tactical skills of a sport, gain confidence in their physical abilities, develop leadership qualities, and work toward a common goal.

Past studies conducted elsewhere had noted that coaches who had high coaching efficacy used more positive coaching styles, had more players who were satisfied with their playing experiences, had higher winning percentages, and had higher efficacy levels among athletes and teams [2, 9]. Therefore, it would be interesting to examine these variables on Malaysian coaches to see whether the outcomes were similar.