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Cooperative Responses In Competitive Soccer, Rodney Gordon Williamson

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to discover patterns in intra-team cooperation (passing) versus individualistic behavior (dribbling) across various age and gender groups. A behavioral coding scheme for soccer players in possession of the ball was designed to tabulate team responses of passing or dribbling behavior in a four-a-side indoor tournament. A total of 32 teams, 18 male teams and 14 female teams, participated in four age brackets. A multi variate analysis of variance (MANOVA) generated one significant result for age and passing behavior. This supported the first hypothesis that intra-team cooperative behavior increased with age. Due to the nonorthogonal …