Understanding youth sport participation through perceived coaching behaviors, social support, anxiety and coping

Understanding youth sport participation has been the emphasis of many researchers over the past 20 years. Although insight as to why youth sport athletes continue and discontinue sport participation has been provided, the past research has not identified how variables, particularly social and psychological variables, interact to affect children's decisions to continue or discontinue their sport participation. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to build on the past research and to examine if youth sport athletes who leave sport differ in their perceptions across time of coaching behaviors, perceptions of social support, level of anxiety and ways of coping from athletes who continue their sport participation. The participants in this study included 132 female youth gymnasts. The gymnasts in the study were participants in the sports of rhythmic and artistic gymnastics. The years of gymnastics participation of the participants ranged from 2 to 12 years. The athletes were training and/or competing in their sport for at least 6 months of the year. The data collection took place over a six month period of time with the gymnasts completing the same set of inventories three times during those six months. The data was examined using Generalized Estimating Equations which accounts for correlated observations over time. The results revealed that the interaction between several variables influenced youth sport participation. Specifically, for gymnasts with higher anxiety and low abilities to cope with adversity are more likely to discontinue participating in gymnastics. Support from family and friends also played a role in gymnast's participation. That is, gymnasts who perceived more support from family and friends were more likely to continue in gymnastics. Finally, gymnasts' participation was also influenced by how they perceived their coaches' behaviors. Gymnasts who perceived their coaches to provide low amounts of non-reinforcement/ignoring mistakes feedback and who perceived their coaches to provide high amounts of punishment oriented feedback, were more likely to discontinue their gymnastics participation. These results moved the sport participation research beyond achievement motivation and expanded our understanding of the relationships between variables which influence sport participation decisions.