Objectives: This study investigates the effects of an institutionalized self-determination theory based (SDT) intervention on youth ice hockey coaches’ interpersonal styles. The primary objective is to empirically test whether the intervention would increase the coaches’ self-rated needs-supportive style and decrease their needs-thwarting style over a one-year timeframe.

Methods: The participating coaches (n 52, mean age 36.71, SD 9.27) underwent a 2-day institutionalized coach education focusing on their needs-supportive and needs-thwarting styles. This included power-point based lectures, group discussions and online handouts. Additionally, the coaches elaborated on needs-supportive behavioral goals and exercised role-playing tasks. The module was delivered through trained coach educators from the Swedish Ice Hockey Association. The coaches received the interpersonal behaviors questionnaire-self (IBQ-self; Rocchi et al., 2017) prior to the intervention (baseline), one and a half weeks, three weeks, and one year after baseline. Latent growth models (LGCM) were used to analyze the change trajectories of the self-rated needs-supportive and thwarting styles.

Results: The results from the LGCM analysis showed a statistically significant increase in the coaches self-reported needs-supportive style (Δ .09, SE .03, p .010), but no statistically significant decrease in their needs-thwarting style (Δ -.04, SE .04, p .274).

Conclusion: The intervention successfully increased the coaches’ self-rated needs-supportive style but did not decrease their needs-thwarting style over a year. In future SDT-based interventions, coaches can also set behavioral goals on the needs-thwarting style, present examples of such behaviors, and discuss in groups of how to mitigate the needs-thwarting style in favor of a needs-supportive style (Reeve, 2009). Our results support the benefit of an SDT-based coach intervention on self-rated behavior change (Raabe, 2019; Reynders et al., 2019), informing about its potential to equip youth ice hockey coaches with adequate needs-supportive skills via institutionalized pathways.