SPORTS DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT IN SWIMMING CLUBS: A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON PORTUGUESE SWIMMERS' PERCEPTIONS

Abstract

The main purpose of this article was to analyse the perceptions of Portuguese swimmers about their context of sport development. We studied the perceptions of 207 Portuguese national level swimmers (Junior and Senior), both males and females, from 28 swimming clubs. The swimmers were differentiated into three groups, according to the club performance level. In this work was applied an adapted version of the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire for Sport (TDEQ), which revealed, statistically, as having an excellent (> .8) or satisfactory (> .6) reliability in 5 out of 7 factors. On the other hand, the commonalities linked to each variable show huge variance (between 0.04 and 0.768). Analysing the results about the swimmer's perceptions, data suggests that the sport development environment does not appear to be significantly different within the 28 Portuguese swimming clubs involved on different sporting divisions.