ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Coaching Effectiveness in Competitive Youth Contact Sports and Martial Arts: Athletes' and Coaches' Perceptions
Provisionally accepted
- 1Ahi Evran University, Kırşehir, Türkiye
- 2Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft, Netherlands
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Contact sports and martial arts can provide an avenue for young athletes' development in physical and psychosocial aspects. Athletes' consistent development of competence, confidence, connection, and character (the 4 Cs) are the desired athlete outcomes for optimal development in a defined sport context, reflecting the extent of coaching effectiveness and the quality of youth sport programming. The purpose of this study was to assess athletes' 4 Cs with respect to their age, gender, competitive level, and birthdate. Athletes (n = 454; 12-18 years of age) and their coaches (n = 45) from boxing, judo, karate, kickboxing, taekwondo, and wrestling completed the validated forms of the measures of the 4Cs of athlete development. Analyses were conducted for each sport outcome separately to examine the differences between the athletes' responses. Descriptive account of the athletes' responses and univariate statistics (e.g., one-way ANOVAs) were used to assess the participants' responses. Findings revealed that the athletes scored high in each outcome. According to the comparisons, the older group of athletes had significantly higher competence and connection scores. Girls perceived less confidence than boys. Competence scores of the athletes from local to international competitive level differs significantly with an increase in line with competitive level, while a significant decrease in their perceived character was observed. Moreover, the athletes born in the first quartile of a year had significantly lower character scores. Results suggest that the athletes have generally gained positive attributes in each examined outcome. However, significant differences observed in the athletes' examined characteristics indicate areas for improvement in coaching practices and youth sport programming. The findings were discussed with the extant coaching literature and suggestions for future studies were provided.
Keywords: Athlete development, Program Evaluation, Relative age, the 4 Cs, youth sport
Received: 15 Oct 2025; Accepted: 03 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Müjdeci, Kılıç, Bulut and Kuru. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Koray Kılıç
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