The relationships between life skills and competition results in high school golfers

Abstract

  The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between life skills and athletic performance in high school golfers. Two hundred fifty-one high school golfers (136 males and 115 females) participating in a major golf competition held in Mie prefecture during August of 2011 were asked to complete a questionnaire—the Appraisal Scale of Required Life Skills for College Student Athletes (Shimamoto et al., 2013)—before the competition. This consists of 10 subscales: stress management, setting goals, thinking carefully, appreciating others, communicating, maintaining etiquette and manners, always making one's best effort, taking responsibility for one's own behavior, being humble, and maintaining physical health and well-being. Based on the competition results, 173 sets of data from the 251 golfers were separated into three groups: a “High Score Group (n=43)”, a “Middle Score Group (n=87)”, and a “Low Score Group (n=43)”. First, the feasibility of applying the life skills scale to high school golfers was supported by the results of confirmatory factor analysis and the fit indices of structural equation modeling using the 251 sets of data. In addition, ANOVA using the 173 sets of data was conducted on the life skills scores obtained before the competition. The ANOVA results showed that the main effects were revealed in four subscales: setting goals, appreciating others, always making one's best effort, and taking responsibility for one's own behavior. Multiple comparisons indicated that the life skills score in the Middle Score Group was significantly higher than that in the Low Score Group in three subscales: setting goals, always making one's best effort, and taking responsibility for one's own behavior, suggesting that specific dimensions of life skills are positively related to competition results.