Student-athletes' sports performance is declining. The mediating effect of coaching style behavior on the relationship between sports motivation and sports performance was examined. Using predictive design, data from 100 student-athletes, selected through stratified sampling, were analyzed via mediation analysis. Results showed that coaching style behavior moderately and partially mediates the correlation between the predictor and criterion, supporting Inverted U theory. The future studies may explore mediating variables to account the remaining 0.695 of the variants in the mediation and utilize qualitative approaches. School leaders may implement trainings in coaching styles for maximizing student-athlete performance.