Playing sports has been a favorite activity among young people for decades and holds considerable promise for both health promotion and educational purposes. Evidence highlights the central role of coaches and the value of coach education program interventions (CEPIs). Yet, the extent to which these programs foster social, cognitive, and emotional development in youth athletes remains underexplored. To address this gap, outcomes ( k = 193) were extracted from 27 studies ( N = 4345) conducted over the past two decades. Results from frequentist and Bayesian meta-analyses indicate that CEPIs are associated with positive youth development, with effect sizes ranging from small to moderate across individual- and micro-level outcomes. These findings underscore the role of trained coaches in creating mastery-oriented and autonomy-supportive motivational climates that foster learning, social interaction, and skill development through sport participation. Taken together, the results extend understanding of theory-driven coach education as a mechanism for sport-based youth development from an ecological perspective and point to directions for future research on program design and validation.
Li et al. (Thu,) studied this question.