Coach and young archers: Hong 2008 study

Two hundred and twenty Korean middle and high school archers, all recurve, completed a questionnaire on four things: how much they interacted with their coach, how satisfied they were with their sport, how much they trusted the coach and how far they intended to keep shooting. The relationships between the four measures were estimated with a structural equation model.

In the final model, interaction with the coach is strongly linked to satisfaction (coefficient 0.792) and less strongly to trust (0.487); satisfaction is in turn linked to trust (0.465), and trust to the intention to continue (0.669). Neither interaction nor satisfaction has a direct link with the intention to continue: both act through trust. The initial model fitted the data poorly (chi-square 54.191 with 31 degrees of freedom, p = 0.006); after the non-significant paths were removed and two measurement errors were allowed to correlate, it fits very well (chi-square 33.937 with 30 degrees of freedom, p = 0.283; RMSEA 0.021; CFI 0.997).

The authors conclude that trust and satisfaction are the link between the relationship with the coach and the decision to stay in the sport.

The archers were approached in 2007 at two national championships, the 33rd Minister of Culture Cup for middle and high schools and the 28th Hwarang-gi championship between cities and provinces, with those representing each province deliberately chosen. Of 300 questionnaires, 262 came back and 220 were used. There were 125 boys (56.8%) and 95 girls (43.2%), spread across all six school years; 29.1% had been shooting for more than 8 years, 28.2% for 5 to 8 years and only 2.7% for less than a year.

The archers filled in the questionnaire themselves during the practice sessions at the championships. Interaction is measured with 16 items on openness, frequency of contact and cooperation; satisfaction with 8 items on skill improvement, relationships with coach and teammates, the programme and the facilities; trust with 4 items on the coach's reputation, general trust, keeping promises and sincerity; and the intention to continue with 2 items. Responses run from 1 to 5. Internal reliability of the scales ranges from 0.661 to 0.855. The authors used confirmatory factor analysis followed by the structural model, in SPSS 15.0 and AMOS 5.0.

All the measures come from the same questionnaire, filled in at the same moment, so the model's "paths" are statistical associations rather than demonstrated effects: an archer who trusts their coach may also describe their interaction more positively, and the model cannot tell the two directions apart. The final model was adjusted on the same data that then judge it, by dropping the weak paths and freeing a correlation between errors, and this improves the fit by construction. The degrees of freedom also go from 31 to 30, whereas dropping two paths and freeing one correlation should take them to 32: the model's figures cannot be fully reconstructed.

The intention to continue is measured with two items, not with actual dropout, and nobody was followed over time. Trust enters the model through a single indicator. The sample consists of provincial representatives at national championships, young people who are already staying in the sport, and the questionnaire was completed during a competition. There are no data on scores, age or the coaches themselves. The text is in Korean, with an English abstract.

For anyone coaching young people, the study describes a plausible link: young archers who say they talk more, and more openly, with their coach and cooperate with them also say they are more satisfied and trust the coach more, and those who trust more are more likely to say they want to continue. It does not show that looking after the relationship with the athlete reduces dropout, because dropout was not measured, and it does not say whether interaction builds trust or trust makes interaction easier.

The clearest finding is that satisfaction on its own is not linked to the intention to stay unless it goes through trust in the coach. It remains an observation on Korean young people who were already selected, in a school system very different from ours.