Coach and Athlete Burnout - West Virginia University

A major effort of subsequent research should also be to identify and recruit
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coaches and athletes who are experiencing a high degree of burnout as study participants.
Although difficult to accomplish as many of these individuals may have dropped out of
sport, assessing coaches and athletes who are experiencing a high degree of burnout may
provide the strongest evidence regarding the potential incongruity between perception of
decision-making style and burnout among coaches and athletes.
A beneficial approach to examining burnout in the future would be to continue to
incorporate qualitative research methods in burnout investigations as has been done in the
past (e.g. Gould, Tuffey, Udry, & Loehr, 1996). This would be particularly useful with a
coach population as little qualitative burnout research has been done with this group to
date. Using qualitative methods of data collection with a sample of athletes and coaches
who are experiencing a high degree of burnout could provide professionals with rich and
valuable information about the nature of burnout and mediating leadership variables that
influence its occurrence in both coaches and athletes.
Additional research attention should also be given to the assessment of burnout
within the sport domain. Because the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire was developed
recently, norms for the subscales and additional validation of the instrument have yet to
be provided. The present research provided additional support for the internal
consistency of this measure, although future research should continue to validate its
psychometric properties across various sport types and establish norms for each of its
subscales to compare future research against. The present research also provided
preliminary support for a measure to assess sport burnout in coaches. To date, no sport
burnout measure is available for the coach population. The internal consistencies found