Decision Making by Coaches and Athletes in Sport

Decision-making is a fundamental element of any sport, especially open, fast, dynamic team sports such as volleyball, football, soccer, rugby, and basketball. In order to succeed in winning any game and competition at national and international level in all individual and team sports there is a need to reconsider all success factors in order to make a better decision to win. At the elite level, coaches and athletes appear to consistently make good decisions in situations that are highly temporally constrained. Although there is no systematic ways of decisionmaking in sports for decision making agents such as coaches, athletes, and referees, there are some characteristics that seem general enough to take away from these fields. This article is to identify these features, then relate them to the methods applied to study decisions in sports by mostly focusing on coaches and athletes.