Author(s): SHIMIZU, Y., MIYAZAKI, M., Institution: INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY, Country: JAPAN, Abstract-ID: 1992

Introduction
Sports-based club activities are popular in Japanese junior high and high schools, and it is reported that traditional authoritarian coaching still remains in some clubs and is traumatizing young students. The Japanese Ministry of Education and Sports recently started to offer training seminars for sports coaches as a means to eradicate abusive behavior during sports club activities. The purpose of this study was to identify factors that lead to coaches’ punishment behaviour including excessive reprimand and corporal punishment, which were to be used in our following study to develop a psychological measurement scale of abusive behaviour of school sports club coaches.
Methods
The subjects were 50 junior high and high school teachers in Japan who were also coaches in school sports clubs (male: 32, female: 18, mean age 41.5). From October to December 2023, they were asked to describe three circumstances in their sports coaching in free-style writing: 1) when they lost their temper, 2) when they became emotional towards athletes, and 3) when they could not control their anger. Those questions were presented with some examples of descriptions (e.g., “An athlete’s attitudes were disrespectful,” “I was overwhelmed with the workload,” “I had been irritated”) and it was made clear that similar answers to the different circumstances were acceptable. To classify their response, text-mining analysis and co-occurrence network analysis were conducted.
Results
The results of the collected text data analyses found five categorized groups of factors: 1) Athletes’ attitudes towards training and games (low motivation, lack of tenacity, and lack of passion), 2) Errors in athletes performance (simple errors, careless errors, and miscommunication among athletes), 3) Violation of club rules (arriving late or leaving early, not cleaning or tidying up after training, disrespectful behaviour among club members), 4) Lack of courtesy towards coaches (disrespectful attitudes towards coaches, lack of politeness and respectable wording, unclear greetings and replies), 5) Reluctance in training (neglecting basic repetitive training, neglecting independent training, lack of concentration during training).
Discussion
The results indicate that school sports club coaches think several student behaviours are triggers to their losing temper and anger control and becoming emotional. It must be true that there are numerous irritating moments with a group of adolescents; however, it should be noted that comparatively few of them recognized that their working conditions and psychological state might have had negative effects on their emotional control. Besides school sports club circumstances that are likely to have negative impact on coaches’ emotional control, coaches’ reflection on their own psychological state, or lack of it, will need to be examined in developing a psychological model to address excessive punishment behavior of sports coaches.