Emotional Intelligence in Youth Sports: Enhancing Performance, Coaching, and Well-Being

Several tools and methodologies can be considered to enhance performance. Coaching and well-being, and other perceptual scales (e.g. rating of perceived exertion; state of enjoyment) can be considered as emotional intelligence moderators and fix with the aim of this special topic. In particular, perceived well-being factors and rating of perceived effort can affect several training or competition factors. However, the relationship between rating of perceived effort and well-being scores, as assessed by the four Hooper scales (i.e., sleep quality/disorders, stress, fatigue, and delayed onset muscle soreness [DOMS]), remains controversial, making further research as still needed. Moreover, sport enjoyment can be also considered as valuable parameter for this scientific topic since it has been defined as a positive affective response to the sport experience (reflecting feelings and perceptions such as pleasure, liking, and enjoyment), and it could be correlated to sport practice, despite hypothesizing scarce relationship with rating of perceived effort.

Youth sport represents a complex scenario. In fact, athletes, in this age period, can be characterized by a high physical, psychological and performance heterogeneity, making complex any type of analysis and interpretation. Therefore, the present special topic aims to show the degree of correlations between different perceptual scales used for monitoring training and performance (i.e., well-being, rating of perceived effort, grade of enjoyment) in youth athletes, even considering different sport circumstances which can be considered as emotional intelligence moderators (i.e., competition level, age, sex, type of sports and training session), and coaching interventions and point of view (i.e., estimation of athletes’ perceptions).

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• well-being and grade of enjoyment of youth athletes;
• internal training (and/or performance) load in youth sport;
• coaching interventions as guideline for new training perspectives and performance results in youth sport;
• comparison between athletes’ perceptions and coaches’ estimations of their athletes’ perceptions in youth sport;
• relationships between athletes’ perceptions and performance successful.

This Research Topic principally welcomes Original Research and Reviews (meta-analyses included).

Keywords: youth sports, coaching, well-being, rating of perceived effort, enjoyment, youth training, youth performance.

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