An investigation of coaches perceptions of the causes of home advantage

This study investigated the personal experiences of 144 high school coaches in terms of their perceptions of the causes of the home advantage. Surveys were distributed to varsity coaches of local high school sports asking the m to assign a percentage value to each of the most common explanations of t he home advantage, reflecting the perceived importance of each, e.g., socia l support, travel or fatigue, site familiarity, officials' Lias, and self-f ulfilling prophecy. A 3 x 6 repeated-measures analysis of variance indicate d that no differences were significant in attribution of the causes of home advantage for the combinations of sex of coach and sex of athlete. A signi ficant difference was noted in the percentages assigned across the five exp lanations provided the coaches. Post hoc comparison indicated that site fam iliarity was seen as the most important explanation across the combinations of the sex of coach and sex of athlete.