Effective coaching in football

Coaches are held totally responsible and accountable for performance outcomes in football. Although this high degree of accountability might seem appropriate to the media and public at large, the reality of understanding effective coaching is more muddied. Effective coaching is complex and multifaceted and occurs within a chaotic, unpredictable, and often uncontrollable environment; that is, it is characterised by an incongruency between intended performance goals and actual results (Jones & Wallace, 2005). The emphasis on winning and the context of football coaching contribute to problematising effective coaching. Therefore, in this chapter, we highlight the problematic nature of judging coaching effectiveness; for example, the varying criteria for assessing coaching effectiveness. Furthermore, we considered the definition of coaching effectiveness in terms of athletes’ outcomes, coaches’ knowledge, and the saliency of context (Côté & Gilbert, 2009). Coaches have obligations to help players flourish through football and contribute to both professional and personal development. These developmental outcomes are contingent upon the quality of the coaching experience. The discussion on the complexity of coaches’ work, the differing tasks and roles of a football coach, will hopefully invite coaches to question and reflect on their current practices, and consider the nature of their impact on players, and what is the evidence of that impact. Finally, effective football coaches should strive to be lifelong learners to provide football players with quality sporting experiences

Discriminating factors between successful and unsuccessful teams: A case study in elite youth Olympic basketball games

Archival data was gathered from the FIBA33 games during the 1st inaugural Youth Olympic Games held in Singapore. Data collected from 70 basketball games played by boys from 20 participating countries were gathered for analysis. Analysis of game-related statistics and FIBA33 final rankings differentiated successful from unsuccessful teams. Ninety-five percent of the cases were correctly classified using discriminant analysis and in the cross-validation (leave-one-out method) the correct re-classification was 75 percent. Data triangulated from interviews and field notes were used to determine key factors contributing to team's success in the FIBA33 games. Results of the present study showed that players from the top 10 successful teams could be differentiated from those in the bottom 10 unsuccessful teams. The determining factors were taller, had better shooting percentages, played aggressively (i.e., recorded more team fouls and the ability to draw fouls on opponents during games). Coaches can use these results to improve player's recruitment process, reinforce the importance of fundamental skills such as shooting, individual offensive and defensive concepts under different game situations during trainings

The coaching behavior scale for sport: factor structure examination for Singaporean youth athletes

The Coaching Behavior Scale for Sport (CBS-S) is designed to evaluate coaches’ involvement in developing athletes, taking into considerations the complex training and competition environment. Although the CBS-S has been used in a number of empirical studies, the factor structure of the instrument has not been examined rigorously. The present study was, therefore, conducted to assess the factor structure of the CBS-S for Singaporean youth athletes. A total of 519 participants completed the CBS-S, and their responses were examined with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and recent exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM). Both sevenfactor CFA and ESEM models fit to the sample data adequately. In addition, the sizes of factor loadings on target factors were substantial and found comparable between the CFA and ESEM solutions. The findings from this study supported the factorial validity of the CBS-S for the present sample

The Influence of Parent Sport Behaviours on Children’s Development: Youth Coach and Administrator Perspectives

There has been much literature and anecdotal accounts reporting poor parental behaviours in the youth sporting context. Youth coaches and administrators, who regularly interact with parents within the youth sporting domain, are potentially a key source for investigating the influence of parents' sport-related behaviours on youths' sporting experiences. Nevertheless, the voice of coaches and administrators has been limited. In this study, the authors sought to develop an understanding of youth sport coaches' and administrators' perspectives of parent sport behaviours' influence on children's development across various sport settings. Additionally, the authors explored participant awareness of and their perspectives of efficacy in relation to current parent education programs in Australia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve youth sport coaches and administrators (eight coaches, four administrators; eight males, four females) with an average of nine years experience. Coaches and administrators reported considerably more frequent negative interactions with parents than positive interactions. Participants also reported more negative observations of parent-child communications than positive observations. Four participants reported exposure to parent education efforts but all perceived these approaches to be inadequate. Recommendations, practical implications, and future avenues of research are discussed

In pursuit of becoming a senior coach: The learning culture for Australian Football League coaches

Background and Purpose: Given the turbulent and highly contested environment in which professional coaches work, a prime concern to coach developers is how coaches learn their craft. Understanding the learning and development of senior coaches (SCs) and assistant coaches (ACs) in the Australian Football League (AFL - the peak organisation for Australian Rules Football) is important to better develop the next generation of performance coaches. Hence the focus of this research was to examine the learning of SC and AC in the AFL. Fundamental to this research was an understanding that the AFL and each club within the league be regarded as learning organisations and workplaces with their own learning cultures where learning takes place. The purpose of this paper was to examine the learning culture for AFL coaches.Method: Five SCs, 6 ACs, and 5 administrators (4 of whom were former coaches) at 11 of the 16 AFL clubs were recruited for the research project. First, demographic data were collected for each participant (e.g. age, playing and coaching experience, development and coach development activities). Second, all participants were involved in one semi-structured interview of between 45 and 90 minutes duration. An interpretative (hierarchical content) analysis of the interview data was conducted to identify key emergent themes.Results: Learning was central to AFL coaches becoming a SC. Nevertheless, coaches reported a sense of isolation and a lack of support in developing their craft within their particular learning culture. These coaches developed a unique dynamic social network (DSN) that involved episodic contact with a number of respected confidantes often from diverse fields (used here in the Bourdieuian sense) in developing their coaching craft. Although there were some opportunities in their workplace, much of their learning was unmediated by others, underscoring the importance of their agentic engagement in limited workplace affordances.Conclusion: The variety of people accessed for the purposes of learning (often beyond the immediate workplace) and the long time taken to establish networks of supporters meant that a new way of describing the social networks of AFL coaches was needed; DSN. However, despite the acknowledged utility of learning from others, all coaches reported some sense of isolation in their learning. The sense of isolation brought about by professional volatility in high-performance Australian Football offers an alternative view on Hodkinson, Biesta and James' attempt in overcoming dualisms in learning

The Coffee Club

Mentoring can be challenging, and when the mentor and both mentees are new to the process it can be even more daunting, due to the uncertainty about content, procedure and expected outcomes. Here, we examine the start of a mentoring relationship within high performance women’s rugby. Interestingly, all three participants (the mentor, Louise, and the mentees, Sarah and Jill) are collaborators in the mentoring process but competitors on the field. All coaches are committed to developing their coaching skills and believe that mentoring can be a useful support tool in this endeavour; however, the practicalities of designing and implementing a mentoring programme are initially ambiguous

Valued learning experiences of early career and experienced high-performance coaches

Background and purpose: This paper attempts to move the discussion of high-performance coach development from an examination of coaches' volume of experiences towards a consideration of the contribution of the learning experiences that coaches have reported throughout their careers. Furthermore, a discussion of proximal and distal guidance in the development of coaches was investigated. We examined the kinds of learning experiences within the framework of workplace learning and specifically the situated nature of learning and the view that learning occurs through social participation.Method: Nineteen high-performance coaches participated in this study, including 10 scholarship and 9 mentor coaches (MCs). Participants rated a list of 14 developmental activities derived from empirical research on a seven-point Likert scale (0=not used, 1=of little value, to 7=extremely valuable). Each participant coach rated the 14 (guided, unguided) activities in the first two years of their coaching career, middle two years, and final two years. To analyse the data and identify the key trends for both the scholarship and MCs we examined statistical differences between scores for each of the sources the non-parametric Friedman test was used (

Social and cultural constraints on football player development in Stockholm: influencing skill, learning, and wellbeing

In this paper, we consider how youth sport and (talent) development environments have adapted to, and are constrained by, social and cultural forces. Empirical evidence from an 18-month ethnographic case study highlights how social and cultural constraints influence the skill development and psychological wellbeing of young football players. We utilized novel ways of knowing (i.e., epistemologies) coupled to ecological frameworks (e.g., the theory of ecological dynamics and the skilled intentionality framework). A transdisciplinary inquiry was used to demonstrate that the values which athletes embody in sports are constrained by the character of the social institutions (sport club, governing body) and the social order (culture) in which they live. The constraining character of an athlete (talent) development environment is captured using ethnographic methods that illuminate a sociocultural value-directedness toward individual competition. The discussion highlights how an emphasis on individual competition overshadows opportunities (e.g., shared, and nested affordances) for collective collaboration in football. Conceptually, we argue that these findings characterize how a dominating sociocultural constraint may negatively influence the skill development, in game performance, and psychological wellbeing (via performance anxiety) of young football players in Stockholm. Viewing cultures and performance environments as embedded complex adaptive systems, with human development as ecological, it becomes clear that microenvironments and embedded relations underpinning athlete development in high performance sports organizations are deeply susceptible to broad cultural trends toward neoliberalism and competitive individualism. Weaving transdisciplinary lines of inquiry, it is clarified how a value directedness toward individual competition may overshadow collective collaboration, not only amplifying socio-cognitive related issues (anxiety, depression, emotional disturbances) but simultaneously limiting perceptual learning, skill development, team coordination and performance at all levels in a sport organization