Abstract
Social network analysis (SNA) is a valuable tool to measure the bonds between athletes and can provide insight into the complexity of relationships amongst team members. Intra-group relationships are critical for sport teams and can include aspects such as cohesion and leadership. Historically, the majority of research examining cohesion and leadership has used questionnaires that provide information about the team as a whole. However, to be concerned with intra-group relations, a focus on actual relations between team members is equally important. Thus, the purpose of this study was to use SNA to examine the relations between team members in order to better understand aspects concerning cohesion and team leadership. Varsity curling team players (N = 5) provided information about their social network ties to other team members with regards to how task and socially cohesive they felt towards each teammate, as well as on task and social leadership skills for each teammate. Total degree centrality analyses, scores ranging from 0 to 1, were conducted and showed that the skip was responsible for holding the team together from both a task (.69) and social (.64) cohesion perspective compared to the rest of the team (.48, .55 respectively). As for leadership, results indicated that the skip and second were viewed as team leaders for both task (.56, .44) and social (.53, .47) leadership compared to the rest of the team (.28, .30). Results may be explained by the fact that the skip and second were the most skilled and oldest players.
