An exploration of the relationship between educational background and the coaching behaviours and practice activities of professional youth soccer coaches

Background and purpose: Despite the proliferation in recent years of higher education establishments offering tertiary-level study in the field of sports coaching, there is a lack of research into the impact of such courses on coaching practice. The behaviours employed and activities used by coaches during practice sessions is an area where one might expect to see such impact, indeed certain studies have tentatively noted the educational qualifications of coaches and suggested that this may play a role in the application of behaviours more aligned with player learning. The purpose of this study was therefore to compare youth soccer coaches with and without tertiary-level qualifications, examining their coaching behaviours and practice activities. Method: The participants were 10 male professional youth soccer coaches aged 24–55 with an average of 13 years coaching experience. Five of the coaches had completed undergraduate degree courses related to sport coaching. All of the coaches worked with players aged under 9 to under 18 in the youth academy of an English professional soccer club. Systematic observation of coach behaviour and practice activities was carried out using the Coach Analysis and Intervention System (Cushion et al. 2012), while follow-up interviews were used to elicit the coaches’ perceptions of, and rationale for, their behaviour. Findings: The observation data showed that graduate coaches used significantly more divergent questioning than non-graduate coaches, while the interview data revealed a general trend for graduate coaches to show greater self-awareness of behaviours and changes in behaviour between practice types. Graduate coaches also provided more comprehensive rationales, for example, seeing silence as a means of facilitating player decision-making as well as for observation. In contrast to previous research, sessions featured a higher proportion of playing form than training form activities and at over 20% of session duration, the ‘other’ practice state was a prominent feature of contact time with players. While some coaches saw ‘other’ as wasted time, graduate coaches identified this as an opportunity for group discussion and social interaction. The study adds to existing data about coach behaviours and practice activities, providing evidence that education background may indeed influence coaching practice

An exploration of the relationship between educational background and the coaching behaviours and practice activities of professional youth soccer coaches

This paper is closed access until 12 December 2019.Background and purpose: Despite the proliferation in recent years of higher education establishments offering tertiary-level study in the field of sports coaching, there is a lack of research into the impact of such courses on coaching practice. The behaviours employed and activities used by coaches during practice sessions is an area where one might expect to see such impact, indeed certain studies have tentatively noted the educational qualifications of coaches and suggested that this may play a role in the application of behaviours more aligned with player learning. The purpose of this study was therefore to compare youth soccer coaches with and without tertiary-level qualifications, examining their coaching behaviours and practice activities. Method: The participants were 10 male professional youth soccer coaches aged 24–55 with an average of 13 years coaching experience. Five of the coaches had completed undergraduate degree courses related to sport coaching. All of the coaches worked with players aged under 9 to under 18 in the youth academy of an English professional soccer club. Systematic observation of coach behaviour and practice activities was carried out using the Coach Analysis and Intervention System (Cushion et al. 2012), while follow-up interviews were used to elicit the coaches’ perceptions of, and rationale for, their behaviour. Findings: The observation data showed that graduate coaches used significantly more divergent questioning than non-graduate coaches, while the interview data revealed a general trend for graduate coaches to show greater self-awareness of behaviours and changes in behaviour between practice types. Graduate coaches also provided more comprehensive rationales, for example, seeing silence as a means of facilitating player decision-making as well as for observation. In contrast to previous research, sessions featured a higher proportion of playing form than training form activities and at over 20% of session duration, the ‘other’ practice state was a prominent feature of contact time with players. While some coaches saw ‘other’ as wasted time, graduate coaches identified this as an opportunity for group discussion and social interaction. The study adds to existing data about coach behaviours and practice activities, providing evidence that education background may indeed influence coaching practice

Who is a coach? Understanding coach subjectivities in professional youth football

Despite being positioned as a central concern for sport coaching research, the exploration of coach identity and the question of who the coach is, has received limited attention. Existing work has highlighted the importance of coaches’ individual ‘performances’ in a dramaturgical sense and resulting social interaction for coaches to establish and maintain their identities. However, it has relied on methods that can only partially capture such aspects. The prevalence of autoethnographic and interview-based studies has limited understanding of identity as a process and emphasised an overly agential and personal perspective. By taking up the notion of ‘subjectivity’ to replace the static and essential connotations of ‘identity’ and conducting a longitudinal ethnography with participant observation, I aimed to recognise the contingent and ongoing constitution of coaches. Two seasons of fieldwork were conducted in the youth academy of an English Football League club using participant observation and semi-structured interviews within an ethnographic framework. This extended period of in-situ data generation followed the regular patterns, spaces, and sites of Academy coaches’ everyday practice. Adopting a Foucauldian lens, the findings highlighted the productive action of power and knowledge, and furthermore, by considering the Academy in terms of Foucault’s ‘carceral archipelago’, the analysis demonstrated the dispersed yet interconnected processes through which coaches were constituted. Academy coach meetings, CPD sessions, training sessions, and matches were all sites of constitutive possibilities, with each space shaping opportunities to produce subjectivities. Problematising assumed ‘truths’ uncovered normative ideals about who was intelligible as an Academy coach and who was excluded as ‘other’. Discourses positioned ex-professional players as ‘experts’ and their playing experiences as the source of legitimate knowledge, shaping subject positions and governing possibilities for coaches. Through disciplinary techniques that sustained a panoptic mechanism, certain coaches internalised coaching methods that made them recognisable as Academy coaches. However, others were resistant and used technologies of the self to produce themselves differently. This demonstrated the possibilities for practices of freedom within a Foucauldian notion of subjectivation. By providing a contextualised exploration of coach subjectivities, this research has developed understanding of ‘identity’ in coaching, illustrating processes of subjectivation through discursive (coaching) practice.</p