Award Date

5-2012

Degree Type

Professional Paper

Degree Name

Master of Science in Hotel Administration

Department

Hotel Administration

Graduate Faculty Representative

James Busser, Chair

Number of Pages

44

Abstract

Introduction

The ability to motivate athletes is one of the major requirements of being a good coach at any level. Collegiately it may even be more important because college athletes are trying to juggle so much in their life. Student athletes have to deal with schoolwork, practice, social life and other various demands that coaches, peers, individual and family members put on them. Student-athletes need to also weigh the options of trying to make sport a career or making sport a secondary option and making education. All educational institutions act politically correct and say that student-athletes are exactly that: students first and athletes second. Unfortunately during the season this is not always the attitude of the coaches and athletes.

In both team and individual settings athletes may either get burnt out or just get tired of trying so hard and not seeing results. As a coach you have to make very tough decisions on who will play and who will act as a reserve player. These decisions may eventually lead to tension between coach and player, player and player, families and coach, or families and player. These coaching decisions may be consequential because of the balance of team cohesion. As a coach you need to make sure that your stars, role players and bench players all stay motivated. If one of more of these units falls behind the whole team will suffer. The population of fans and media may only judge a coach on their ability to put forth a winning program and will praise coaches on star athletes and records, but the true meaning of coaching is to be able to make everyone on the team work hard and strive for the ultimate goal. If a coach caters to or gives special attention to just a few players the team and program will eventually suffer.

As a coach you need to make sure that you know your players inside and out. Being able to learn what makes them tick individually and in the team setting will determine how successful your program is. The star players need the backups and the bench players just as much as the program needs the star players. If it were not for the bench players competitive practice would not be possible. The bench players are also vital in trying to mimic the next opponent’s strategy. The coach is in charge of watching the videotape and coming up with a game plan but it is the job of the bench players to play out this game plan in practice so that the starters can get a feel for what is coming up. The bench players not only need to play out the other teams strategies, but also needs to make sure that they are learning their team’s strategies incase of injury or other circumstances where they may need to be in the game. This can cause burnout and a feeling of being undervalued if they do not ever get in the game.

Keywords

Coaches (Athletics); College athletes; College sports — Coaching

Disciplines

Education | Sports Studies

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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