A multidimentional factor model for team preparation in basketball

Aim of the research: development of a scientifically proven multidimensional factor model for team preparation for youth basketball championships and evaluation of its contents in youth basketball team cohesion and psychological stability for its optimisation.
Methods of the research: Group Environment Questionnaire test (adapted version), players‟ psychological stability test, discussion, testing, documental material analysis, pedagogical experiment and mathematical statistics. The research was carried out from year 2007 to year 2009 (N=131). During the research, a statistically credible, mutually correlative link was determined between team cohesion, players‟ psychological stability, overall physical training and game performance indices, as well as between the three factor structure
multidimensional model for team preparation for youth basketball. Team cohesion structure consisted of three components with weight in factors above 0.5 (GI-T r=0.839; GI-S r=0.853; ATG-T r=0.577; ATG-S r=0.726). Psychophysical factor structure consisted of two components: overall physical condition (r=0.701) and emotional stability (r=0.652). Self-regulatory factor structure consisted of two components – self-regulatory skills (r=0.787) and motivational component (r=0.823). The multidimensional factor model team training for championships optimises team cohesion, players‟ psychological stability and, therefore, also team performance is improved. It was concluded that in both experimental and control group there were no statistically credible differences between teams (p>0.05), this verifies that the teams were homogeneous. In the experimental group (before and
after the experiment) there were statistically significant differences in all team cohesion and psychical stability scales. The changes in indices are statistically significant (p<0.05).