IMPACT OF SELF-EFFICACY COMPONENTS ON ATHLETES’ PEAK PERFORMANCE IN NATIONAL SPORTS FESTIVAL IN SOUTH-WEST NIGERIA

Coaches play a significant role in motivating and enhancing the performance of their team athletes. The main goal of this study was to examine the impact of self-efficacy components in athletes’ performance in the National Sports Festival (NSF) in South West, Nigeria. A descriptive research design was adopted for this study. The population comprised all athletes from Lagos, Ogun and Oyo State in Southwest Nigeria. The sample size selected for the study were (114 athletes) both in track and field, ball games, combat sports, racket games and swimming using a stratified sampling technique. A standardized and self-developed questionnaire by Bandura (1994) was the instrument used for the study. The questionnaire used in the pre-test were coded and analyzed using the Cronbach-Alpha reliability coefficient to establish the internal consistency of the instrument and the result obtained was 0.84. Simple percentage and frequency counts were used for the demographic data of the respondents while inferential statistics of multiple regression were used to analyzing the data at a 0.05 level of significance. The study concludes that two of the variables tested (vicarious experience and past performance accomplishments) significantly improved the performance of athletes in the National Sports Festival while verbal persuasion was not significant. The study recommends that coaches should focus on utilizing self-efficacy as mental skill techniques to help athletes in their interpretation of past performance accomplishments as facilitative.