Examining the effect of coach-athlete relationship on athletes' commitment to sports

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the coach-athlete relationship on athletes' commitment to sports. The study employed a survey (survey) model, one of the quantitative research models. A total of 442 athletes, 256 male and 186 female, actively involved in sports participated in the study. Data were collected through affiliation with a researcher and expert interviews, along with a personal information formula, the Sportsmanship Scale (Sırgancı et al., 2019), and the Coach-Athlete Relationship Inventory (Altıntaş et al., 2012). Before analyzing the data collected to evaluate the athletes' relationships with their coaches and to examine their levels of commitment to sports, normality distributions and descriptive statistics were examined. The normality of the variables was assessed based on skewness and kurtosis values. Parametric testing methods were used to determine the relationships between variables and group-level differences within the scope of the findings. Assuming a normal distribution of the data, independent samples t-tests and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used for group comparisons, and Pearson's correlation coefficient analysis was used to examine the relationships between variables. Multiple linear regression was used to determine the impact of the coach-athlete relationship on sport commitment. A significance level of .05 was used in the analyses, and effect sizes were also evaluated. The findings revealed statistically significant and positive correlations between all variables (p < .01). This suggests that the stronger and more positive the coach-athlete relationship, the higher the athletes' motivational commitment to sport.