2024 Volume 58 Issue 1 Pages 1-14
[Background]
Interpersonal conflict issues between coaches and club members frequently occur when managing and promoting athletic club activities. Prior studies on coaching methods for sports club activities of skill instructions and team management have focused on male athletes, but few studies target female athletes. In this study, the qualitative survey targeted female soccer club athletes to investigate the desirable coaching styles to promote female athletes.
[Methods]
An open-ended questionnaire survey of Google Forms was conducted between July and August 2021. The subjects were ten female succor athletes（Mean age=20.90, SD=1.45）who manage as leaders in the women's soccer club teams belonging to the Kanto University Women's Soccer League Division 1. The survey consisted of questions regarding 1）essential attributes（age, gender, years of soccer experience, number of club members）and 2）ideal management and coaching attitudes and methods.
[Results]
As a result of morphological analysis, 1,079 words（used words: 512 words）were extracted, and the top 35 high-frequency words that appear more than three times were shown in Table 1. The word that appeared most frequently was “player” （17 cases）, followed by “member” （13 cases）, “solution” （10 cases）, “team” （7 cases）, and “play” （7 cases）. As a result of the co-occurrence network analysis, descriptions of the management and instruction abilities required of coaches include 1）promoting the growth of club members, 2）understanding the competition strategies, 3）psychological support, 4）being comfortable interacting with club members, and 5）reasonable instructing attitude.
[Discussion]
In this study, the desirable coaching style for women's soccer athletes was evaluated by text mining analysis. The results showed that the desirable coaching style was classified into five categories. The results also indicate that coaches of women's soccer teams can effectively promote the psychological safety of female athletes and team organizations by consciously utilizing the "words" shown in these five categories in coaching. Previous research results that targeted male athletes revealed some different desirable elements from the results of this research in the coaching evaluation. In future research, specific coaching methods for female athletes should be considered.
