Sports psychology and athlete-coach relationship are both massive subject, I can easily spent hours to speak about them and I don’t even everything.

Coach job is to observe, develop athlete and help athlete to develop their skills. It matter who is your coach, especially if you have certain goals. Your coach can be very talented, but if your thoughts and characters don’t meet up, you mind find difficult to work with your coach, also this might eventually affect your own motivation to train.

Coach need to be good listener and observer, he/she has to be able to read athlete. Athlete and coach spend massive amount of time together, those times include bad and good days. Everyone who does the sport know that there are days when everything feels too hard and difficult and you would just rather do the something else. On these bad days, coach role is important, how to motivate the athlete. Especially if there is the group of people, coach can’t treat everyone in the same way, as everyone is individual and have different need. A general sight is the group of teenagers in field and the coach screaming and yelling in the side. That might work for some of the group, but not everyone.

When coach learn to read athlete and right ways to communicate and motivate the athlete, they gain athlete’s trust. To learn these things need a lot of experience, practice, observing, studying. In my opinion, every coach should have at least basic knowledge of sports psychology, as that would help them recognize for example different types motivation theories, emotions and how athlete respond in different situations. Not only recognizing these but also learn to respond and use correct ways to help athlete.

Coaches don’t need to play sports psychologist, but athletes often open up to coaches, which is the normal thing, as they spend a lot of time together and know each other very well. Having some basic knowledge will help coach the answer and act the way that athlete got comfortable feeling. And not every athlete have the money to go to meet sports psychologist. Of course coaches can’t change themselves, even though they have good knowledge and skills about psychological side doesn’t mean that they get along with every athlete. That’s why I recommend look and try to find coach with whom there are good chemistry.