An Investigation of Coaches' Perceptions of the Causes of Home Advantage

Abstract

This study investigated the personal experiences of 144 high school coaches in terms of their perceptions of the causes of the home advantage. Surveys were distributed to varsity coaches of local high school sports asking them to assign a percentage value to each of the most common explanations of the home advantage, reflecting the perceived importance of each, e.g., social support, travel or fatigue, site familiarity, officials' bias, and self-fulfilling prophecy. A 3 × 6 repeated-measures analysis of variance indicated that no differences were significant in attribution of the causes of home advantage for the combinations of sex of coach and sex of athlete. A significant difference was noted in the percentages assigned across the five explanations provided the coaches. Post hoc comparison indicated that site familiarity was seen as the most important explanation across the combinations of the sex of coach and sex of athlete.