Coaches Coaching Coaches Pt. 3

What 128 Athletes Told Me About Motivation (And What It Means for Your Program)

I want to talk numbers this week. Not scores, not win-loss records, but the kind of numbers that actually tell you something meaningful about what is happening inside your program.

For my graduate research project at the University of Oklahoma, I administered a validated sport psychology survey called the Sport Motivation Scale II to 128 high school athletes at Deer Creek High School. Football players and track and field athletes, freshmen through seniors. The goal was to understand what actually drives them to show up, work hard, and keep coming back.

What I found was encouraging. But it also raised some important questions that I think every coach needs to sit with.

What Is the Sport Motivation Scale II?

The SMS-II is an 18-question survey built around Self-Determination Theory. It asks athletes to respond to one simple prompt: "Why do you practice your sport?" From there, it measures six categories of motivation, ranging from the most self-determined to the least.

The six categories are Intrinsic Regulation, Integrated Regulation, Identified Regulation, Introjected Regulation, External Regulation, and Non-Regulation.

Intrinsic Regulation is the purest form of internal motivation: doing something because you genuinely love it and find it meaningful. Non-Regulation is the opposite, a lack of motivation altogether, where the athlete does not see a connection between their effort and any outcome.

In an ideal world, you want your athletes scoring high on the first three categories and low on the last three. High intrinsic values. Low extrinsic ones.

What the Data Showed

Here is what came back from 128 Deer Creek athletes. Each category is scored from 0 to 21.

Identified Regulation came in with the highest average score at 17.3, with nearly 79% of athletes scoring in the high range. That means most of these athletes participate in their sport because they see it as personally important, something tied to who they are and who they want to become.

Intrinsic Regulation averaged 15.4, with about 61% of athletes in the high range. These athletes are showing up because they genuinely enjoy it and find it interesting.

Integrated Regulation averaged 15.0, with about 55% scoring high. This measures whether athletes see their sport as aligned with their core values and sense of self.

On the flip side, External Regulation averaged 8.8, with nearly 60% of athletes scoring low. And Non-Regulation, the amotivation category, averaged just 7.1, with nearly 73% scoring low.

In plain terms: most of these athletes are not playing because of trophies, social pressure, or fear. They are playing because they want to.

What This Tells Us About Culture

These results do not happen by accident. They are a reflection of the environment these athletes have been placed in. When the majority of your athletes report high intrinsic motivation and low amotivation, it says something about the culture that has been built around them.

What stood out to me the most was Identified Regulation being the highest-scoring category. These athletes see their sport as part of their identity. They are not just playing football or running track; they are football players and track athletes. That level of identity connection is a direct result of coaches building programs that make athletes feel like they belong to something real.

The area worth watching is Introjected Regulation, which averaged 12.7 and had about 39% of athletes scoring high. Introjected motivation is the kind that is driven by guilt, shame, or not wanting to let others down. It is motivation, but it is fragile. It sits right on the edge between internal and external, and it can tip the wrong way if the culture allows it.

More on that next week, because I think the introjected regulation data tells a really important story for coaches, especially at schools like Deer Creek where outside pressure can be significant.

Why This Research Matters

To my knowledge, this is the first time the SMS-II has been used with adolescent athletes in the United States. Every other study I found using this instrument was conducted in the collegiate setting, or internationally in countries like Spain and the Czech Republic.

That gap in the research is actually part of why I pursued this project. High school athletes are not just younger versions of college athletes. They are in a completely different developmental stage. They are figuring out who they are. They are navigating parental expectations, social dynamics, and big life decisions, all while trying to compete at a high level.

Understanding what motivates them is not just a sport psychology exercise. It is a coaching necessity.

The numbers gave me a lot of confidence in what we are doing at Deer Creek. But they also gave me a roadmap for where we need to do better. And I think that is exactly what data is supposed to do.

Next week, I am going to break down how we specifically try to build integrated and identified regulation in our football program, with real examples from our leadership council and the culture work we do every day.

This post is part of an ongoing series based on my graduate research project at the University of Oklahoma, examining student-athlete motivation through Self-Determination Theory in a high school athletic program.