Background/Purpose: A coach-athlete relationship is determined by a growing mutual respect and appreciation between a coach and athlete (Jowett, 2005), and it provides the foundation for which both the coach and athlete's emotional, practical, social, and psychological needs are fulfilled (Jowett, 2009). Coach-athlete relationships have been shown to predict how team members will interact with one another (Jowett & Chaundy, 2004), which can affect their team success. However, little research has been conducted on understanding a new coach-athlete relationship and the impact of the outcome of the season. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the impact of the success of season on college athletes' perceptions of their relationship with a new coach. It was hypothesized that athletes' perceptions would significantly improve when they experienced a successful season, more so than student-athletes who experienced a non-successful season.
Method: A total of 48 female collegiate team sport student-athletes from a Division I university participated in this study. At the beginning and end of the season, participants completed the Coach-Athlete Relationship Questionnaire (CART-Q; Jowett & Ntoumanis, 2004), which examines the closeness, commitment and complementarity of the coach-athlete relationship.
Analysis/Results: Results indicated significant changes in the interactions for the closeness and commitment dependent variables, with the non-successful group's scores significantly decreasing, while the successful group's scores did not significantly change.
Conclusions: The findings of the present study identify the need for coaches to develop strong relationships with the athletes in order to combat the effects of an unsuccessful season.