Communication with young players

Coaches and athletes highlight the importance of communication in creating an environment that builds athlete competence, confidence, connection, character, cooperation and sense of community (Lynch, 2001). However, communication has attracted little interest in the research community. The general guidelines that explain the communication process have been borrowed from other disciplines and applied to the sports setting (Martins, 1987; Weinberg and Gould, 2007). It is only recently that the relational aspects of coach-athlete communication have been explored (LaVoi, 2007), and connections made explicit between learning theory and communication (Fleming et al., 2008).