Koh, Koon Teck

There has been an increasing growth of external coaches employed by schools in Singapore to train and prepare their athletes for inter-school competitions. As these coaches come from different educational and professional backgrounds, their standard of coaching has varied. This study focused on the behaviour and interactive decision-making of experienced and inexperienced basketball coaches.

A review of the literature revealed that there are differences between experienced and inexperience teachers / coaches both in the classroom and in the sports setting. This study compared five experience and five inexperienced secondary school male basketball coaches as they are planned and executed a 30 minute "Pick and Roll" practice session. All practice sessions were videotaped . Interval recording procedures ( four second observe / one second code) were employed with the Arizona State University Observation Instrument (A.S.U.O.I.) to collect coach behaviour data. Coaches were also interviewed and audiotaped immediately after the practice session. Their responses were analysed using Sherman's Model of Interactive Decision-making instrument, to determine coaches' decision-making patterns.

Analysis of the data revealed that experienced coaches exhibited significantly more concurrent instruction behaviour (U=2.0, p<0.05) than inexperienced ones, where as inexperienced coaches asked a significantly greater number of questions (U=0.0, p,0.05) than their experienced colleagues. With regard to interactive decision-making, results indicated that both experienced and inexperienced coaches carried out practice mostly according to their plans (Path 1). When they encountered serious problems, however, inexperienced coaches were significantly more willing to change plans (Path 5) than their experienced counterparts (U=3.0,p<0.05).