RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STUDENT-ATHLETES TEAM COHESION AND SPORTS PERFORMANCE IN UNIVERSITIES IN THE NORTH - EAST ZONE, NIGERIA

This study was conducted to determine the relationship between student-athletes team cohesion and sports performance in Universities in the North - East Zone Nigeria. Two objectives were set which leads to formulating research questions. The design of the study was correlational design. Similarly, a null hypothesis was tested at a 0.05 level of significance. The population for the study comprised 13 Universities in the North - East Zone Nigeria, 1170 student-athletes. A convenience sampling technique was used to select 3 Federal Universities and 270 student-athletes out of which 162 were males and 108 were females . Purposive sampling technique was used to select the three (3) Universities (Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Bauchi, Modibbo Adama University Yola, and University of Maiduguri). The instruments used to collect data were Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ) has 24 items which was adopted from Manning (2008), with the response mode of Not at all=1; Confidence=2; and Extreme Confidence= 3, and Sports Performance Questionnaire (SPQ) which used four points Likert scale response mode of Strongly Agree=4 points; Agree=3 points; Disagree=2 points; and Strongly Disagree= 1 point. The reliability of the instruments were .83 and .75 respectively. Descriptive statistics of mean and Standard deviation was used to answer the two research questions. Inferential statistics of Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient ( r ) was used. The Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient ( r ) tested the only hypothesis at 0.05 level of significant. SPSS version 20 was used to analyze the data. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between student-athletes' team cohesion and sports performance, which showed that students - athletes were related to sport performance. Based on the findings the following recommendations were drawn that Coaches should help train student -athletes develop a high sense of team cohesion especially during training sessions and sports competition. Moreso the study recommends that States Directors of Sports should liars with the Mobile Network Providers in their domain to help sponsor sports competitions in their variousstates. Based on the findings of the study it was concluded that student-athletes demonstrated positive team cohesion which apparently facilitated their performances.