Self-belief of archery coaches: Yacshie 2022 study

Forty coaches of after-school archery programmes in eight state senior high schools in Banyumas district, Central Java, filled in a 12-item questionnaire on their confidence in running and sustaining the training programme. The mean score was 46.10, which the authors place in the central band, which they call "sufficient". Split into five bands, 2 coaches fell in the very low band (5%), 9 in the low band (22.5%), 13 in the middle (32.5%), 13 in the high band (32.5%) and 3 in the very high band (7.5%).

The questionnaire covers four aspects: motivation, strategy, technique and character development. Technique has the most coaches in the low bands (16 of 40, or 40%), followed by character development with 12 (30%); for motivation and strategy the middle band is the most crowded, with 20 and 23 coaches respectively.

It is a descriptive survey carried out in April 2019 using a Google form. Coaches were selected on three criteria: working at a state senior high school in the district, at a school with an archery programme, and being willing to take part. The questionnaire was adapted from an instrument the same research group had used before; the authors report a Cronbach's alpha of 0.897 in the abstract and 0.896 in the methods, with validity checked by product-moment correlation. The items concern running the after-school programme (for instance, if I fail I keep trying until I succeed), not archery-specific skills. The data are presented only as frequencies and percentages.

The five bands are not absolute thresholds: they are built from the mean and standard deviation of the sample itself, so the middle band runs from 44.32 to 47.88 around 46.10. With this method some coaches always land in the low bands and some in the high ones, whatever the group's actual level: saying that 27.5% have low confidence only means they sit below their colleagues. The paper gives neither the response scale nor the maximum score, so 46.10 cannot be compared with anything else.

The data that would help most in reading the result are also missing: the coaches' training and experience, whether they shoot themselves, and their pupils' results. It is not clear how eight schools have 40 archery coaches, and the abstract at times refers to sports coaches in general. There is no comparison and no relationship with any other variable, so the coaches' confidence is not linked to anything.

For someone who shoots, the study changes nothing: it measures the confidence of people coaching young archers in Indonesian school programmes, using a generic instrument about running a programme. For anyone organising youth courses there is one piece of context: according to data from university community outreach work in the district in 2018 and 2019, almost 90% of the middle-school teachers coaching in the district have no coaching training, and in interviews some said they felt uneasy when parents were watching. The link between coaches' confidence and archers' results remains to be studied, since this work does not measure it.