Coaches' learning and sustainability in high performance sport

In undertaking their complicated and multi-faceted work, high performance coaches have previously been shown to be influential in the performance of athletes. It has also been noted that high performance coaches are learners by necessity. However, what remains unclear is how coaches' learning influences their engagement in sustainable practice. This study draws on three cohorts of full-time high performance coaches employed in Olympic and professional sports throughout Australia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted face-to-face and were inductively analysed. The results revealed that the coaches were presented with a variety of opportunities to learn, with the most valued sources being 'learning on the job', 'discussions with others' and 'experience as athletes'. These unmediated learning opportunities are critiqued along with other mediated opportunities in relation to notions of sustainability. The dominance of unmediated sources of learning meant that sustainable practice was present but was not assured. Sustainable practice is also discussed in relation to the dominant models of high performance athlete development and the demands of coaching work

Rethinking the factuality of “contextual” factors in an ethnomethodological mode: Towards a reflexive understanding of action-context dynamism in the theorisation of coaching

In this paper, an argument is made for the revisitation of Harold Garfinkel's classic body of ethnomethodological research in order to further develop and refine models of the action-context relationship in coaching science. It is observed that, like some contemporary phenomenological and post-structural approaches to coaching, an ethnomethodological perspective stands in opposition to dominant understandings of contexts as semi-static causal ‘variables’ in coaching activity. It is further observed, however, that unlike such approaches – which are often focused upon the capture of authentic individual experience – ethnomethodology operates in the intersubjective domain, granting analytic primacy to the coordinative accomplishment of meaningful action in naturally-occurring situations. Focusing particularly on Garfinkel's conceptualization of action and context as transformable and, above all, reflexively-configured, it is centrally argued that greater engagement with the ethnomethodological corpus of research has much to offer coaching scholarship both theoretically and methodologically

How elite coaches' experiential knowledge might enhance empirical research on sport performance

In sport science, much research has been aimed at developing empirical knowledge of performance and practice. While this body of work has led to significant advances in understanding, one source of information that has been under-represented is the analysis of experiential knowledge of high-level athletes and coaches. Using the run-up task in sport as an exemplar, we were interested in understanding the relationship between the experiential knowledge of elite coaches and empirical research findings to ascertain how a combination of these knowledge sources might enrich understanding of sport performance. For this purpose, fifteen interviews were conducted with elite coaches from three sports; track and field, gymnastics, and cricket. The qualitative data showed elite coaches intuitively expressed ideas consistent with recent scientific research in their design of training and learning programs. Key ideas expressed included perception-action coupling, the effects of interacting constraints on performance, and an approach to practice which was consistent with insights from nonlinear pedagogy. The data revealed how experiential knowledge of elite coaches might be used to support and enhance empirical research processes. Specific examples include providing direction for future research, assisting in the representative design of empirical research, and highlighting limitations of some empirical research protocols and findings. The coaches' comments suggested a need for more systematic and sustained efforts to explore how experiential knowledge might enrich understanding of sport performance