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The purpose of the current study was to develop, implement, and evaluate a season-long athlete leadership development program. Participants were 27 female varsity athletes who participated in four leadership workshops throughout the season, each 1 hr in duration. All of the participants completed inventories measuring leadership behaviors, cohesion, communication, athlete satisfaction, and peer motivational climate. Overall, the results showed significant differences in regards to leadership behaviors, athlete satisfaction, and peer motivational climate from pre- to postintervention. Further, follow-up focus groups were also conducted to assess the social validity of the leadership development program. These focus groups revealed important insight into program structure, influence of the program, leadership challenges, and suggestions for future improvements. These findings provide researchers, sport psychology consultants, and coaches with important information regarding the effectiveness of this athlete leadership development program in targeting human and social capital development.

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The present study sought to address 2 limitations of previous athlete-leadership research: (a) Researchers have predominantly examined the shared nature of athlete leadership using aggregated approaches, which has limited our ability to examine differences in the degree of sharedness between teams, and (b) the limited availability of research related to dyadic predictors (i.e., qualities of the relation between 2 individuals) of athlete leadership. Therefore, social-network analysis was used to examine athlete leadership across multiple levels (i.e., individual, dyadic, and network) in 4 competitive female youth soccer teams (N = 68). Findings demonstrated differences in the degree to which athlete leadership was shared between the teams. Furthermore, multiple-regression quadratic-assignment procedures showed that skill nomination and formal leadership status were significant predictors of how often participants reported looking to their teammates for leadership.

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