The impact of football trainers' effective communication skills on coach-athlete relationship

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of football trainers' effective communication skills to coach-athlete relations, by determining the level of the mutual relationship and comparing the variables by demographics. One of the quantiative research models, Relational Screening Model, has been used in this study. In order to gauge the effective communication levels of football trainers, Effective Communication Skills Scale (ECSS) (Buluş, Atan and Erten Sarıkaya, 2017) has been utilized along with the 'Coach-Athlete Relationship Questionnaire (CART-Q)'which aims to determine the coach-athlete relationship level (Jowett and Ntoumanis, 2012). The scope of the participants is the football trainers who are licensed by the Turkish Football Federation. 276 such trainers voluntarily participated in this study. T-test, one-way variance analysis, Tukey test and correlation analysis were performed with the SPSS 20.0 software in the analysis of the data. In the regression model constituted, it has been observed that there is a negative relation in between trainers' self-knowledge/self revelation skills and loyalty relations, as well as, in their empathy and complementarity relations. Significant differences were determined when coach-athlete and effective communication levels were analyzed on the basis of demographics. The thesis concludes that there is a positive relationship in between trainers' effective communication skills and their socio-economics statues, educational level and background. Moreover, trainers' complimentarity and closeness skills were highly strong.