Exploring the Experiences of Community Sport Coaches: Stressors, Coping Strategies, and Mental Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, athlete mental health has received increased attention from researchers; however, coaches also experience stressors that can impact their mental health. This study addressed a gap in the sport coaching literature by using a phenomenological approach to explore the experiences of community sport coaches in Canada—an understudied population that makes up a large portion of the coaching workforce. Nineteen coaches from Atlantic Canada discussed stressors, coping strategies, and mental health in one-on-one semistructured interviews. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results are presented in three higher order themes: mental health culture in sport, influences on coach mental health, and coping strategies and supports. Our findings suggest that community coaches experience a variety of stressors (e.g., interpersonal, personal, organizational) similar to elite coaches, but that the origin of stressors may be different in the community sport context. The impact of stressors can be mitigated by coaches’ coping strategies, access to training and resources, and aspects of the role that support their mental health (e.g., rewarding work). Finally, these results suggest that training should address gaps in mental health literacy for coaches to support their own mental health needs as well as their athletes’ needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".