Contracting and chaining to improve the performance of a college golf team: improvement and deterioration

Recent work with operant procedures in sports has shown that feedback, reinforcement, and chaining can be effective techniques in improving performance. In many cases, however, a problem remains in getting the participants to practice the appropriate responses. In the present study, 14 college golfers were put on successive contingency contracts over three weeks to go through the Total Golf chaining-mastery program of Simek and O'Brien. Rewards consisted of activities such as spots on the starting team and the opportunity to play better courses as well as tangible rewards such as new golf balls. After the first two weeks of training, through 19 steps backward from the green, the mean of three posttraining rounds for these 14 golfers was 3.4 strokes lower than the mean of their three rounds at baseline. At this point, the coach did not follow through with the rewards promised in the second contract. Having been placed on extinction, only three of the 14 players followed through on the third contract. In this return to baseline-like condition an average increase of over two strokes for the team as a whole was noted. The number of steps of the chain mastered in practice and the difference between mean scores at baseline and the last measurement period correlated .86, indicating that 74% of the improvement in golf scores was accounted for by performance on the mastery chain.