Coping under pressure : strategies for maintaining confidence amongst South African soccer coaches

Sport coaching can be a fulfilling and rewarding occupation, but can also be stressful because of the demands and expectations of various external factors. The complex and extraordinary demands placed on coaches, force them to perform multiple roles (e.g. educator, motivator, counsellor, adviser, trainer, manager and administrator). Soccer coaches face a number of challenges, frustrations, conflicts and tensions, the enormity of which is often underestimated. This notion is supported by the description of coaching as a perilous occupation in which coaches experience pressures like stress, conflict and tension, media pressure and intrusions into family life. This study explored the perceptions of South African soccer coaches in terms of the mechanisms they use to cope with potential stressors experienced in their jobs and employed a non-experimental design, using a quantitative approach, to assess stress and coping strategies of South African coaches. One hundred and twelve soccer coaches, coaching at the provincial level and higher, completed a questionnaire on stress and stress coping mechanisms used in their coaching jobs. Descriptive data analysis was completed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS – version 16). The sources of stress experienced and coping methods used by the coaches were evaluated. Results revealed that the top three sources of stress were a lack of resources, fixture backlog and games where the outcome is critical, whilst the lowest three sources of stress were political interference, physical assaults from players and substituting a player. Moreover, various coping strategies used by the coaches showed that an average of 5.68%, 5.14% and 89.78% of the sample used maladaptive coping, emotion management coping and problem management coping strategies respectively. Academic and practical implications of the study results are discussed.

Motives influencing soccer coaching : an empirical study of professional soccer coaches in South Africa

Heightened competition both on a global and national level has raised the bar regarding the expectations that sport organisations have of their coaches. Using the Self-Determination Theory (SOT), which emphasizes the distinction between intrinsically- and extrinsically- driven behaviours, the current study investigated the specific intrinsic and extrinsic factors that motivate professional soccer coaches in South Africa to coach. A non-experimental design using a quantitative approach to assess the motives of individual involvement of coaches in South Africa was employed. The Coach Motivation Scale (CMS) designed to assess motivational factors in coaching was administered to a purposive sample of 112 soccer coaches. Exploratory factor analysis was used to assess the number and nature of factors of the underlying structure of the data. In addition, correlation analysis was conducted on the data set. Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation correlated significantly with highest academic qualification. Arising from the findings of the study implications for further study are suggested and recommendations made.

Soccer stinger (suspense) SFX

A sound designed stinger featuring a suspense heartbeat to a penalty kick with a goal and crowd cheers with vuvuzelas.

Soccer goal stinger SFX

A stinger featuring a kicked football, vuvuzela and cheering.

Dynamic threshold determination by local and global edge evaluation

In this paper we consider two methods for automatically determining values for thresholding edge maps. In contrast to most other related work they are based on the figural rather than statistical properties of the edges. The first approach applies a local edge evaluation measure based on edge continuity and edge thinness to determine the threshold on edge magnitude. The second approach is more global and considers complete connected edge curves. The curves are mapped onto an edge curve length/average magnitude feature space, and a robust technique is developed to partition this feature space into true and false edge regions. A quantitative assessment of the results on synthetic data shows that the global method performs better than the local method. Furthermore, a qualitative assessment of its application to a variety of real images shows that it reliably produces good results.

Threshold dynamic time warping for spatial activity recognition

Non-invasive spatial activity recognition is a difficult task, complicated by variation in how the same activities are conducted and furthermore by noise introduced by video tracking procedures. In this paper we propose an algorithm based on dynamic time warping (DTW) as a viable method with which to quantify segmented spatial activity sequences from a video tracking system. DTW is a widely used technique for optimally aligning or warping temporal sequences through minimisation of the distance between their components. The proposed algorithm threshold DTW (TDTW) is capable of accurate spatial sequence distance quantification and is shown using a three class spatial data set to be more robust and accurate than DTW and the discrete hidden markov model (HMM). We also evaluate the application of a band dynamic programming (DP) constraint to TDTW in order to reduce extraneous warping between sequences and to reduce the computation complexity of the approach. Results show that application of a band DP constraint to TDTW improves runtime performance significantly, whilst still maintaining a high precision and recall.

Effect of temperature on anaerobic fermentation of banana stem residue

Anaerobic fermentation experiments were conducted on banana (pseudo) stem residue to study the relationship between fermentation temperature and gas production yield and gas production rate, and methane content. Based on fixed dry matter concentration, inoculum concentration and fermentation time, different temperatures, i.e. 25, 30, 35, 40°C were selected and formed four experimental groups. Four levels of single factor tests were conducted to optimize temperature parameter for anaerobic fermentation of banana stem residue. The results showed that the daily gas yield of banana stem residue reached the maximum value of 36.8L on the fourth day at 35°C, and the average gas yield was 5.03L/d. The total gas yield was 402.3L, while the maximum methane content was 61.2% in the whole fermentation process. The results indicated that the comprehensive effect was best at 35°C in anaerobic fermentation of banana stem residue.

Dynamic threshold determination by local and global edge evaluation

In this paper we consider two methods for automatically determining values for thresholding edge maps. Rather than use statistical methods they are based on the figural properties of the edges. Two approaches are taken. We investigate applying an edge evaluation measure based on edge continuity and edge thinness to determine the threshold on edge strength. However, the technique is not valid when applied to edge detector outputs that are one-pixel wide. In this case, we use a measure based on work by Lowe for assessing edges. This measure is based on length and average strength of complete linked edge lists.

Global and threshold-free transcriptional regulatory networks reconstruction through integrating ChIP-Chip and expression data

Inferring transcriptional regulatory networks from high-throughput biological data is a major challenge to bioinformatics today. To address this challenge, we developed TReNGO (Transcriptional Regulatory Networks reconstruction based on Global Optimization), a global and threshold-free algorithm with simulated annealing for inferring regulatory networks by the integration of ChIP-chip and expression data. Superior to existing methods, TReNGO was expected to find the optimal structure of transcriptional regulatory networks without any arbitrary thresholds or predetermined number of transcriptional modules (TMs). TReNGO was applied to both synthetic data and real yeast data in the rapamycin response. In these applications, we demonstrated an improved functional coherence of TMs and TF (transcription factor)- target predictions by TReNGO when compared to GRAM, COGRIM or to analyzing ChIP-chip data alone. We also demonstrated the ability of TReNGO to discover unexpected biological processes that TFs may be involved in and to also identify interesting novel combinations of TFs.