The Influence of the Coach’s Halftime Talk on Players’ Performance

Understanding the influence of coaches on the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of the teams they lead may not only help in developing effective ways of encouraging within-team communication, but also in influencing the teams` performance. The current study aimed at examining the influence of the coach’s halftime talk on players` performance. The study followed a mixed-methods design. Participants were nine basketball players from the top men`s elite league in Israel, the team coach, and two assistant coaches. The qualitative approach included observation sheets on behaviors that occurred during the coach’s halftime talk, which was also filmed. In the quantitative part, the coach’s halftime talks were analyzed into several categories. Each category was codded according to the number of times it was repeated in the coach’s talks. Seventeen films of halftime talks were analyzed and categorized into main themes. ANOVA and t-tests were applied. The results demonstrated specific patterns of coaches’ talks that were mainly related to the balance of points achieved by the team until halftime. For example, when the team arrived at halftime with a negative balance, a large number of negative feedbacks in the coach’s talk increased the likelihood of losing the game.