Is Winning Everything? The Relative Contributions of Motivational Climate and Won-Lost Percentage in Youth Sports

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the main and interactive effects of motivational climate and won-lost percentage upon young athletes’ evaluations of their coaches, enjoyment of their team experience, and perceived parental liking for the coach. A total of 268 male and female youth basketball players, aged 10 to 15 years, completed the Motivational Climate Scale for Youth Sports (Smith, Cumming, & Smoll, in press) and selected attitudinal scales relating to their sport enjoyment and their evaluations of their coach. Regular season won-lost percentages were calculated for each of the 50 teams. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to predict player evaluations of the coach. Attitudes toward the coach were positively associated with perceptions of a mastery-involved climate and negatively associated with perceptions of an ego-involved climate. Won-lost percentages positively predicted players’ evaluations of their coach's knowledge and teaching ability, but accounted for far less attitudinal variance than did the motivational climate measures. Consistent with earlier findings, young athletes’ sport enjoyment, and evaluations of their coach were more strongly related to coaching behaviors than to their team's won-lost record. No significant interactions involving winning and motivational climate were found.

Sean P. Cumming, Frank L. Smoll, Ronald E. Smith, and Joel R. Grossbard, Department of Psychology, University of Washington.

This research was supported in part by Grant 2297 to Ronald E. Smith and Frank L. Smoll from the William T. Grant Foundation.

Notes

An exploratory factor analysis revealed that all of the six items loaded substantially on a single evaluation factor, accounting for 61.6% of the response variance. Nonetheless we have chosen to combine the four athlete-coach related evaluation items into a composite score and to consider the parent-coach evaluation and team enjoyment items separately on the grounds that they are conceptually distinct from the athlete-coach evaluation items (see Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994, for a discussion of relations between factorial and construct validity). We also present the individual items because they relate differentially to winning, to provide a comparison with previous research (e.g., Smith et al., 1978), and to maximize information for the reader.

∗p < .05.

∗∗p < .01.

∗∗∗p < .001.