In two studies, the relationship between adolescent athletes’ skill development and perceived coach behavior as well as motivation climate was investigated. In Study 1, 119 (61 male, 58 female) competitive swimmers from various clubs with a mean age of 12.5 years responded twice with a one year interval to the Leadership Scale for Sports and the Perceived Motivational Climate in Sport Questionn...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether involvement in sporting activity in mid-adolescence would deter delinquent behaviour in late adolescence. METHODS Members of a longitudinal cohort study were interviewed at ages 15 and 18 years and, among other topics, were asked questions relating to involvement in physical activity and delinquent behaviour. Logistic regression models were used to examine the r...

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPARα) is a transcription factor that regulates lipid and glucose metabolism. Accumulating evidence suggests that the intron 7 C allele of the PPARA gene rs4253778 G/C polymorphism has an advantage for power-oriented athletes, presumably due to the hypertrophic effects on skeletal muscle and increase in glucose utilization in response to anaerobic e...

Most team sports are characterised by repeated short maximal sprint efforts interspersed with longer periods of active recovery or rest. Although a variety of testing protocols have been devised to simulate these activity patterns under controlled conditions, a common limitation is the lack of 'body contact' to simulate the tackling efforts seen in contact sports. Therefore, the purpose of this...

Drawing from a three-factor model of organizational commitment, we sought to provide validity evidence for a multidimensional conceptualization designed to capture adolescent athletes' commitment to their coach-athlete relationship or their team. In Study 1, 335 individual-sport athletes (Mage = 17.32, SD = 1.38) completed instruments assessing affective, normative, and continuance commitment t...

Abstract. The player of squash has a choice between two options when his/her opponent changes the score from 8:7 to 8:8. The player to receive has to decide whether to play until 9th or until 10th point. We observe in this paper that the score of the squash game can be modelled as a Markov chain. Thus using standard techniques of Markov processes, we can derive the optimal strategy for the squa...

This paper highlights the importance of examining interpersonal interactions in performance analysis of team sports, predicated on the relationship between perception and action, compared to the traditional cataloguing of actions by individual performers. We discuss how ecological dynamics may provide a potential unifying theoretical and empirical framework to achieve this re-emphasis in resear...

This study explored the knowledge and perceptions of elite coacting sport coaches as applied to team cohesion. Six experienced university crosscountry running coaches who achieved high levels of success and recognition were purposefully chosen and interviewed for this study. Results demonstrated that these coaches valued cohesion and felt it played an integral role in developing team success an...