What Supports a Wrestling Coach’s Self-Efficacy? — A Study of 116 Coaches in Turkey

🌏 日本語版はこちら：コーチの自己効力感を支えるもの ― 116名のレスリング指導者調査から

“Some days, I just don’t feel confident in what I’m teaching.”

This is something I hear from fellow coaches — quiet remarks, often dropped at the end of a long practice.

“After today’s session I kept replaying the cues I gave, all the way home, wondering if any of them landed right.”

“Watching the veteran coaches, I feel like I still have so far to go.”

“When an athlete stops improving, I start to wonder whether the problem is sitting in my own coaching.”

In a 2022 NCAA survey of more than 6,000 coaches across U.S. college sports, roughly one in three coaches reported that on most days they felt emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed, or unable to sleep (NCAA Coach Well-Being Study, 2023). Coaching is a profession that can shape an athlete’s life for decades — and the weight that comes with that work is real. So what carries a coach through, without folding under the pressure? Today’s study, by Terekli and colleagues (2026), narrows the lens specifically to wrestling coaches and tries to describe, in a structured way, where their sense of “I can do this job” actually comes from.

Two notes up front. The NCAA figure above is drawn from U.S. college athletics as a whole, while the main paper we’ll discuss is on Turkish wrestling coaches — the cultures and institutional systems are different. I introduce the NCAA data only as scene-setting, to make the point that the weight coaches carry is, in some form, a shared issue across sports and across countries.

The third post in this series asked why some adolescent athletes burn out and others keep going. This time the camera turns from the athletes to the people standing behind them: the coaches. If you coach, support a coach, or simply pay attention to the inner life of the people who teach, this one is for you.

What “Coach Self-Efficacy” Means — The Inner Conviction of the Person Teaching

A quick definition first. “Self-efficacy” refers to a person’s subjective belief that, in a given situation, they can carry out a specific action well. The concept was introduced in the late 1970s by the psychologist Albert Bandura, and it has since been studied across education, sport, and health.

Self-efficacy is sometimes translated loosely as “self-confidence,” but the two are not quite the same. Self-efficacy is closer to “I can pull off this behavior in this situation” — a conviction tied to a specific action — rather than a global feeling about oneself as a person.

Applied to coaches, coach self-efficacy is generally broken down into several components: technical instruction, tactical instruction, motivation, and character building. Across multiple studies, coaches with higher self-efficacy have been shown to positively influence their athletes’ performance, motivation, and willingness to keep going in the sport.

Which means: asking “what supports a coach’s self-efficacy” is not only a question about coaches — it ultimately matters for the athletes too.

Overview of the Study — Measuring 116 Wrestling Coaches in Turkey

The paper I’ll be discussing was published in 2026 in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.

Terekli MS et al. Determinants of self-efficacy in wrestling coaches: psychological resilience and proactive personality. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living (2026).
Source: https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1770227

• Participants: 116 wrestling coaches working in four Turkish cities (Eskişehir, Kütahya, Tokat, Konya)
• Method: A cross-sectional questionnaire study. Three psychological scales, all administered in their Turkish-language versions.
• Three psychological measures: Coaching Efficacy Scale II, Psychological Resilience Scale III-R, Short Proactive Personality Scale
• Analysis: Correlation analysis followed by multiple regression

These three scales were also validated specifically for the wrestling-coach sample through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), meaning the numbers in this study sit on top of measurements that have been formally checked for what they are supposed to measure.

Key Term 1: Psychological Resilience

Psychological resilience refers to the capacity to recover from stress, setbacks, and failure. Rather than snapping under pressure, the person bends and springs back — it’s a kind of psychological elasticity. The first article in this series, on a 30-boy RCT, also centered on resilience, but from the athlete side. This study takes the same concept and turns it on the person doing the teaching.

Key Term 2: Proactive Personality

A proactive personality describes someone who, instead of being shaped by circumstances, takes the initiative to shape circumstances themselves. They don’t wait for instructions — they start what needs starting. They don’t react to problems after the fact — they head them off. The scale measures individual differences in this kind of forward-leaning behavior.

Results — What Explained 46% of the Variation in Self-Efficacy

1. All three psychological measures showed positive correlations

Coach self-efficacy correlated positively, and significantly, with both psychological resilience and proactive personality. Coaches with higher resilience — and coaches who took the initiative in shaping their environment — tended to report higher self-efficacy.

2. Multiple regression: two variables explained 46%

• Psychological resilience → coach self-efficacy: β = .42, p < .001
• Proactive personality → coach self-efficacy: β = .38, p < .001
• Multiple correlation R = .68 / Coefficient of determination R² = .46 (p < .001)

A quick note on how to read these numbers. β (standardized regression coefficient) tells us, after accounting for the other variables in the model, how strongly a given variable is associated with the outcome — in this case, self-efficacy. Values closer to 1.0 indicate a stronger association; values closer to 0 are weaker. In the social sciences, β = .42 and β = .38 are both considered moderate-to-fairly-strong associations.

R² (the coefficient of determination) tells us what share of the variation in the outcome is accounted for by the variables in the model. A value of .46 means that nearly half of the variation in coach self-efficacy in this sample was accounted for by just these two variables. Conversely — and this is worth holding onto — the remaining 54% comes from factors this study did not measure: years of coaching experience, the club environment, the relationship a coach has with their athletes, and so on.

3. The Strongest Link in Five Dimensions — Character Development

Coach self-efficacy is itself composed of several dimensions: technique, strategy, motivation, character building, and character development. Among these five dimensions, proactive personality showed its strongest correlation with character building efficacy (r = .56, p < .001).

Beyond teaching technique and tactics, coaching also carries an educational side — shaping the kind of person an athlete becomes. The result suggests that a coach’s own willingness to take initiative and reshape the environment may be doing especially heavy lifting in that educational dimension. For readers whose coaching is centered on character work, cultivating one’s own proactive disposition may quietly come back as confidence in that very domain.

4. Experience Does Build — But the Real Jump Comes Later

The study also compared self-efficacy across coaching license levels. Self-efficacy rose with experience, but the meaningful, statistically significant jump appeared only at Level 3 (senior coach) and above, compared with coaches below that level.

Does coaching confidence rise smoothly with years on the mat, or does it crystallize only after a certain threshold has been crossed? This result points toward the latter. For mid-career and veteran coaches who have stayed in the gym for the long haul, the finding can be read as a quiet piece of evidence that experience does contribute to growth — the climb is real, even if the obvious step-change shows up later than one might expect.

5. The authors’ conclusion

Terekli and colleagues conclude that, to raise coaching self-efficacy, approaches that build psychological resilience and proactive personality matter — and that doing so contributes to the quality of coaches’ professional capacity and coaching behavior.

How This Translates to the Wrestling Mat

This study was carried out with Turkish wrestling coaches — a sample directly focused on wrestling — which makes the findings unusually translatable to our environment. Let me sort the practical implications by audience.

1. For Coaches — Build the Conditions for Your Own “Confidence”

When the confidence to coach wavers, our first instinct is usually to reach for the knowledge or the results side: “I need to study more,” “I need to produce better outcomes.”

What this study suggests is that, before knowledge and results, the habits of mind a coach carries are doing a lot of the load-bearing work.

• Do you have your own route back to your feet after a failure? (psychological resilience)
• Are you stepping in early, rather than waiting for problems to arrive? (proactive personality)

Neither of these is a fixed trait you’re born with. Both resilience and a proactive disposition can be cultivated — through daily habits, and through the support of the people around you.

When I first started coaching, I carried failures around with me for far too long. At some point I started asking myself a question: if I show up to practice with that weight on my face, isn’t the mood I bring spilling over onto the athletes? Reflecting on what went wrong matters — but dragging it around for days afterward, I came to think, is its own kind of problem. So I tried to draw a line: take the lesson, then move forward. Each time, I asked, “what could I do differently next time to keep this exact mistake from happening again?” and acted on the answer. Whether any of that translated into better outcomes for the athletes is something I can’t prove. What I can say is that it kept my own mental health intact.

2. For Clubs and Schools — Coaching the People Who Coach

A related line of research called Self-Determination Theory points out that when coaches’ own psychological needs — autonomy (a sense of choosing for oneself), competence (a sense of having the capability), and relatedness (a sense of being connected with others) — are left unmet for too long, they tend to drift toward more controlling behavior with their athletes. This is not a question of the coach’s personality; it is a question of the environment in which the coach is asked to work.

The coach who supports the athlete also needs to be supported. That framing becomes the starting point for thinking about what an organization — a club, a school, a federation — can put in place around its coaches.

In the wrestling coaching landscape in Japan, the idea of caring for the coach’s own mental health is, I think, still not widely shared. The implicit model has often been: “if the coach holds it together, the athletes will follow” — which leans heavily on the individual coach. What this study implies is something different: if the environment supporting the coach is well built, the coach’s self-efficacy rises, and the benefits eventually reach the athletes. That’s a way into thinking about coaching organizationally, not just personally.

• Is there a regular space where coaches can share what they’re struggling with?
• Are coaches given protected time for learning and recovery?
• When a coach makes a mistake, is the culture one of review-and-improve rather than blame?

Cultivating this kind of soil and culture is something I would like Wrestle InSight, in the years ahead, to contribute to as well.

3. For Parents — Notice the Invisible Weight a Coach Carries

From a parent’s perspective, a coach often looks like “the professional training my kid” — and the coach’s own inner life rarely comes into the frame.

What this study reminds us is that a coach is, also, a person. A few words at drop-off, or in passing at a competition venue — “thank you for everything you do,” “please take care of yourself too” — can become, more than we might guess, a small source of psychological recovery for a coach.

4. For Athletes — How You Relate to Your Coach Matters

For an athlete, a coach is one of the most influential figures in their competitive life. This study sits on top of a body of work showing that coach self-efficacy is in turn linked to athlete performance. Which means: there isn’t a lot an athlete can do directly to lift a coach’s self-efficacy, but the way the athlete responds — listening well, reporting back on what they tried, expressing thanks — supports a coach’s sense of “I’m glad I taught this person,” and that, in time, comes back around.

In-the-moment feedback is of course welcome. But the thing that has meant the most to me, honestly, is when a former athlete shows up at the gym after they’ve graduated. They’re probably not coming to see me — they’re there to cheer on the younger athletes, or to keep their own training up — but the fact that they come back to that space at all is, I suspect, one of the deepest quiet joys a coach gets. And often, in the old stories we trade, they’ll say something like, “that thing you used to tell us — I finally understood it after I left.” A multi-year answer-key, delivered late. It’s one of the moments when a coach can think, “maybe what I was doing wasn’t so far off after all.”

Limitations of This Study — What to Keep in Mind

The paper presents a clean and strikingly strong result, but several caveats are worth flagging — in the interest of reading the work honestly.

• It is a cross-sectional study. The questionnaire was administered at a single point in time. We cannot say with confidence whether high resilience leads to high self-efficacy, or whether high self-efficacy nurtures resilience. Both directions are plausible, and may well be operating at the same time.
• All measures are self-reported. Every score comes from the coaches themselves. People inclined to say “I’m tough” or “I take initiative” may also be inclined to say “I’m a capable coach,” which can inflate the relationship (common-method bias).
• A sample of 116 coaches from four Turkish cities. This is a valuable dataset directly focused on wrestling coaches, but the regional culture and coaching system are specific to Turkey. Whether the same pattern holds in the Japanese wrestling environment requires separate testing.
• Many unmeasured factors. Recall that 54% of the variation in coach self-efficacy is not explained by these two variables. Years of coaching experience, the support system at the coach’s organization, relationships with athletes, family support, financial stability — these and other factors may well be doing meaningful work in the background.
• This is not an intervention study. The paper does not show that “training coaches in resilience raised their self-efficacy.” It observes the association linking two variables at a single point in time — and should be read in that frame.

The honest reading isn’t, “sharpen your resilience and proactivity and a coach’s confidence is solved.” A more careful reading would be: resilience and proactive personality may account for a large share of what supports coach self-efficacy — but they are one part of a wider picture.

What I’ve Seen on the Ground

Over the years, I’ve coached wrestling across several settings — from elementary school through university. One thing I’ve come to feel, after all of that, is this: the confidence to coach doesn’t arrive only on the days you get a good result. If anything, it grows out of how you put yourself back together on the days that didn’t go well. Those repeated recoveries, stacked over years, are what underwrite the long-running sense that “I can keep teaching this.”

And that isn’t something an individual can build on grit alone. Advice from senior coaches, honest reactions from athletes, the trust of parents, the support of clubs, universities, and federations — the 54% of variation sitting outside this study’s two variables almost certainly includes these relationships as part of the picture.

Conclusion — “Before Strong Athletes, Coaches Who Can Stay Standing”

What this paper showed is that, for wrestling coaches, 46% of the variation in coach self-efficacy was accounted for by psychological resilience (β = .42) and proactive personality (β = .38).

In competitive sport, attention tends to flow toward the athletes — their abilities, their efforts. Coaches sit in the “teaching” and “directing” role, and are not as often seen as people who themselves need support.

But coaches, too, are people — people held up, in part, by resilience and by the willingness to step in early. Building an environment in which a coach can recover after a tough day; leaving the kind of space in which a coach can move first rather than react last — these contribute, quietly, to the quality of what the athletes go through.

The third article in this series looked at how the factors behind burnout appear to differ for boys and girls. This time we turned the lens to the coach who stands behind those athletes. The other value of sport — what an athlete carries away beyond winning — is not only an athlete’s theme. For the people who teach, too, it’s a theme about what makes it possible to keep going.

Before strong athletes, coaches who can stay standing. Putting that into practice begins with thinking, slowly and concretely, about the support structures around the coach themselves. That is what this paper left me with.

Read the other articles in this series:
Part 1 — Does Wrestling Strengthen the Mind? A New 2026 RCT on Adolescent Boys
Part 2 — How Parents at Home Shape Kids’ Behavior on the Mat: A 2026 Study on Autonomy Support
Part 3 — Are the Factors Behind Burnout Different for Boys and Girls? A 2025 Study on Sport Motivation

References

Main paper:

• Title: Determinants of self-efficacy in wrestling coaches: psychological resilience and proactive personality
• Authors: Terekli MS et al.
• Journal / Year: Frontiers in Sports and Active Living (2026)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1770227
• PMID: 41993125

Background reference:

• NCAA Sport Science Institute. (2023). NCAA Coach Well-Being Study: Stress, well-being, and identity of NCAA coaches. https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2023/1/24/research-coaches-well-being.aspx

About Wrestle InSight

Wrestle InSight is a media outlet that examines wrestling through three combined perspectives — former wrestler, coach, and researcher. It is run by Sho Ito, who moves across two kinds of knowledge — the practical knowledge built on the mat, plus the scientific knowledge built in the university. The goal is to add one step of depth to information that too often passes by as “just a vague impression.”