This project seeks to investigate the efficacy of sport in character development. There is a surprising paucity of research evidence to support the widely acclaimed benefits of sports in character development.
The project will engage a focus group of local coaches to assist in refining research ideas about the moral culture of sport teams and the means by which the moral culture can be enhanced. The intent is to develop three developmentally-tailored "guidebooks" for coaches, and this would greatly assist with that project.
A second objective is to conduct in-depth interviews with the basketball players and coaches of 12 teams (2 male and 2 female teams at each of three levels: junior high/youth sport, interscholastic, and intercollegiate). These semi-structured, open-ended interviews will focus on perceptions of team moral culture and will provide one source of in-put for the further development of the Team Culture Questionnaire (TCQ).
The project will also consult with the leadership of three major training programs for coaches: Michigan State's Youth Sports Institute, the Positive Coaching Alliance at Stanford University, and Maine's Center for Coaching Education. These programs were selected because they regularly train large numbers of volunteer and part-time coaches through workshops and seminars. They represent the types of organizations, through which most youth sport coaches will be trained, if they are trained at all. It is worth noting that of the 21 graduate programs that offer degrees in coaching, none have required course that focus on the coaches' role in character education, and only three - Ohio University, Smith College, and Western Michigan University - have required courses in sport ethics. The purpose of these consultations is to identify and evaluate the ways in which character education is integrated into these select institution's coach training methods. These activities, taken together, will help to develop a research agenda.
