Creating an Inclusive, Positive Sporting Environment

1. Creating an Inclusive, Positive Sporting Environment • Understand athletes’ characteristics • Inclusion of all • Athlete-centred approach

2. Athletes Characteristics • Different physical • Fitness • Body build • Senses • Hearing, touch or pressure, balance, visual, kinaesthetic • Different personality • Attitudes • Values • Attentional Style • Anxiety • Need to achieve • Different backgrounds • Different communication styles

3. Basic Fundamental Emotional Needs • The need to be accepted and to belong • The need to feel significant • The need to feel capable or competent • The need to feel safe

4. Self-Esteem • Belief in oneself, self-respect and self-liking • Sense of self worth • Critical to learning • Self-esteem enables people to believe they are competent and worthwhile and more willing to take on new challenges • Helps to become more compassionate, responsible human beings • Affect health, relationships, competence, goals that are set and achieved, performance and happiness • Coach is a major contributor

5. Demonstrating that You Care for and Accept Each Individual Athlete • Take athletes seriously • Listen carefully • Tell athletes you care for them • Touch respectively • Smile • Use simple hand gestures • Be sensitive to ethnic and racial terminology • Be sensitive to pronunciation of names • Provide sincere encounters

6. Encouragement • Search for, identify and acknowledge the athlete’s strengths • Display faith and confidence in the athlete’s abilities and judgements • Give responsibility • Avoid criticising mistakes, look for logic behind mistakes instead • Recognise effort and improvement not just final achievements

7. Increasing Intrinsic Motivation • Provide for successful experiences • Give rewards contingent on performance • Use verbal and nonverbal praise • Vary content and sequence of practice drills and activities • Involve participants in decision making • Set realistic performance goals

8. Positive Reinforcement • Choose effective reinforcers • Ensure appropriate timing and frequency • Select behaviours to reward • Successful approximations • Performance (not only outcome) • Effort • Emotional and social skills • Provide knowledge of results • Provide contingent, sincere feedback

9. Principles of Reinforcement • Positive reinforcement • “If doing something results in a good consequence, people tend to try to repeat the behaviour to receive additional positive consequences” (Weinberg & Gould, p. 138) • Negative reinforcement • “If doing something results in an unpleasant consequence, people tend to try not to repeat the behaviour to avoid more negative consequences” (Weinberg & Gould, p. 138)

10. Approaches Influencing Behaviour • Positive: • Designed to strengthen desired behaviours by motivating participants to perform them and by rewarding them when they occur • Negative: • Attempts to eliminate unwanted behaviours through punishment and criticism, thus primary motivation is fear.

11. Punishment • “A consequence that weakens or suppresses a behaviour that produces it “ (Williams, 1998, p.31) • Punishment works by arousing fear, if used excessively, punishment promotes the development of a fear of failure, (which equals a decrease in performance) • Side effects: • unpleasant coaching situations that hinder the learning of skills • arouses resentment and hostility • coaches need to look at their role modelling for young people’s social development

12. Guidelines for Using Punishment • Be consistent • Punish the behaviour, not the person • Allow athletes’ input for making up punishments • Do not use physical activity as a punishment • Ensure punishment is not perceived as a reward or getting attention • Impose punishment impersonally • Do not punish athletes for making errors in performance • Do not embarrass individuals • Use punishment sparingly

13. Preventive: The coach avoids sources of disruption and maintains appropriate athlete behaviour Disciplinary: The coach handles inappropriate behaviours as they occur Refers to any provisions that the coach makes to create an appropriate environment for learning Training SessionManagement

14. Training Session Management • Preventive Management: • The proactive rather than reactive strategies coaches use to develop and maintain a positive climate in which minimal time is devoted to behaviours • Managerial Task System • Establishment of a structure to create an appropriate learning environment. It establishes the limits for behaviours and expectations a coach has for his/her athletes

15. Preventive Management • Control initial activity • Start sessions promptly and on time • Establish and practise signals and routines • Coach proactively • Use high levels of specific feedback • Interact positively • Avoid slow-downs and breaks • Use management games • Use brief and concise instructions

16. Skills for Preventive Management • Routines • Prompts and hustles • Positive reinforcement • Games

17. Rules and Routines • Routine: • A procedure for performing specific behaviours within a class setting, behaviours that tend to recur frequently and unless structured, can potentially disrupt or delay the pace of a session • Rules • defining acceptable or unacceptable behaviour

18. Entry Warm-up Attention/quiet Home base Gain attention Disperse Equipment Retrieve Start Boundaries Finish Leave Housekeeping Routines

19. Guidelines for Rules • Short and to the point • Appropriate language • 5-8 rules • Stated positively • Consistently applied • Consistent consequences • Willing to enforce

20. Non-Managerial Activities • Content-related instructions • Explanation of a game, activity • Explanation or description of a skill • Individual or group feedback • Athletes are practising a skill or activity or playing a game

21. Managerial Activities • When the coach stops or interrupts an activity and then resumes or initiates a new activity • Gathering for instruction • Transition to new activities • Telling personal stories, unrelated to context

22. Barriers that Condemn Athletes to Failure • Having unrealistic athletic expectations of the athletes • Evaluating young athletes’ social behaviour according to adult standards or evaluating the athletes on the basis of expectations that have not yet been achieved • Criticising or “dumping on” athletes when they are already down. • Talking too much and not allowing the athletes to discover useful explanations themselves • Excessive directing • Assuming the worst • Maintaining standards that are too low

23. If you expect perfection from people, your whole life is a series of disappointments, grumblings and complaints