Analysis of the Competitive Activity Structure of Skilled Female Basketball Players

Abstract

The study purpose was to examine, analyze, and generalize the competitive activity structure based on the hierarchy of technical and tactical indicators of skilled female basketball players in won and lost games using principal component analysis. Materials and methods. The study participants were 96 professional female basketball players, members of national teams of Spain, France, Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Latvia, Italy, and Slovakia, which took the 1st-8th places in the final tournament of the European Basketball Championship 2017. The study analyzed 16 main technical and tactical indicators of skilled female basketball players in 52 official games to examine and interpret the obtained results using principal component analysis. The total number of observations is 52. Results. The experimental indicators obtained during the study made it possible to examine and analyze the grouping of elements of the competitive activity structure of skilled female basketball players, to interpret the obtained results in order to define informative criteria for optimizing training and improving the competitive activity effectiveness. The study revealed considerable differences in the competitive activity structure in won and lost games: in accordance with the most significant indicators of factor loadings, the percentage of a sample of elements that correlate with one another is: for won games – 67.40%, for lost games – 69.52%. Conclusions. Principal component analysis is quite effective and informative for studying the competitive activity structure of skilled female basketball players. It was demonstrated that the greatest difficulties in studying the competitive activity structure in basketball using principal component analysis are the selection of indicators that do not duplicate one another and are not calculated, expert interpretation of the obtained results, and algorithmization of special analysis of technical and tactical indicators.