Developing a culture of excellence: Canadian university coaches' perceptions on preparing for national championship games
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research in sport psychology has continuously demonstrated that athlete performance and satisfaction are influenced by their coaches' knowledge, skills, and behaviours. Although there are numerous publications on how coaches influence their athletes' performance during regular-season contests, there is limited research on how coaches prepare themselves and their teams for National Championship competitions. For any team, winning a National Championship is a difficult task, but winning several National Championships is extraordinary and very few coaches have accomplished this goal. The purpose of this study was to investigate highly successful Canadian university coaches' perceptions on how they prepared themselves and their teams for continued success at the National Championship Tournament. The participants were six Canadian university coaches who had combined to win 16 coach of the year awards and more than 30 National titles. Data were collected through individual interviews and were analyzed following Braun and Clarke's (2006, 2013) guidelines for thematic analysis. The results revealed that the coaches' ultimate goal was to develop and maintain a high standard of excellence in their programs every year, which was accomplished by meticulous planning, effective communication, emotional management skills, and self-reflection. Developing a culture of excellence started by elaborating detailed seasonal plans that encompassed every aspect of training starting the first day of training camp up until and including the National Championship game. This allowed the coaches to maintain a culture where they demanded high levels of technical, tactical, physical, and mental excellence in training. This culture was nurtured every year through effective communication with athletes and support staff. In particular, the coaches felt it was critical to meet with the players and support staff before leaving to the tournament venue to reiterate and clarify their roles and expectations, which allowed the team to stay focused and avoid unnecessary distractions during the tournament. Once the championship tournament began, the coaches felt it was important for themselves and their athletes to effectively manage their emotions. Finally, the participants believed it was important to engage in self-reflection after each National Championship because it allowed them to assess and modify their coaching skills and behaviours for subsequent seasons. In sum, this study adds to the body of literature on coaching expertise by providing one of the first empirical accounts on how coaches prepared their teams for National Championship Tournaments. The findings of this study benefit both head and assistant coaches by offering insights and strategies on how to develop and maintain a culture of excellence in elite sport programs.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".