A[head] of the Game: Developing a mental health coach educational resource to foster quality sport environments for athletes with disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the mental health benefits of sport for athletes with disabilities are well-established, the quality of the sport experience plays an important role in shaping these outcomes. Coaches are instrumental in creating high-quality sport environments that support athlete mental health, yet few resources exist for coaches in disability sport regarding how to foster such environments. Grounded in the Quality Parasport Participation Framework, this dissertation presents three studies aimed at developing a mental health educational resource for disability sport coaches. Study 1 used qualitative interviews and body mapping with 10 high-performance athletes with disabilities to explore how the quality of their sport experiences intersected with mental health. Using inductive codebook thematic analysis, the findings illustrate that quality sport experiences, shaped largely by the coach-athlete relationship, are deeply intertwined with mental health, highlighting the need for coach education that promotes inclusive and athlete-centered environments in disability sport. Study 2 used convergent parallel mixed methods through a cross-sectional survey administered to 30 disability sport coaches (n=19) and other athlete-facing staff (team managers [n=7] and technical directors [n=4]) to examine their prioritization of the experiential elements of quality participation for athlete mental health and explore their preferences for a coach mental health educational resource. Participants expressed a need for ongoing, interactive mental health education that is tailored to athlete experiences, includes practical tools and expert facilitators, and is delivered through accessible formats to enhance learning and implementation. Study 3 used a multistage, participatory mixed methods study design, using the nominal group technique and a follow-up focus group, to co-create a coach-facing mental health educational resource for use in disability sport. A total of 46 priorities for mental health education were generated, with 14 selected for inclusion in the resource. Top-ranked topics included open coach-athlete communication, athlete readiness for long-term participation, and awareness of impairment and daily routines. Qualitative findings emphasized practical strategies such as structured check-ins, mentorship to foster belongingness, and managing fast-tracked athlete transitions to prevent burnout and support athlete well-being. Together, findings from this program of research highlight the importance of quality participation in shaping athlete mental health and emphasize the central role of coaches in fostering quality sport environments for athletes with disabilities. The resulting coach educational resource, grounded in both athlete and coach perspectives, offers initial progress toward addressing identified gaps in mental health support within disability sport and lays the groundwork for future development of evidence-informed, community-driven training materials.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".