ABSTRACT
During the 1980s and 1990s considerable discussion was generated concerning the regulatory checks and balances for a number of occupations. Perhaps the key drivers for the development of social responsibility were the excesses of stock market traders or CEOs who toiled happily under the leitmotif ‘greed is good’, affording themselves huge financial salaries and bonuses unchecked by the market or their own corporate structures. What followed thereafter was the development of a serious debate about the loss of personal virtues such as responsibility and organisational values such as accountability and trust. This very general atmosphere was compounded in sports, at least in the UK, by two other factors. The first was a process of professionalisation where what had ruled in sport hitherto, whether in terms of administration or coaching, was distinctly unregulated. The voluntary nature of most sports labour (from youth sport and even up to national sports federations) seemed to lack structure, efficiency, accountability and control. Second, coupled with this awakening was a plethora of child abuse cases where the lack of organisational checks and balances allowed paedophiles to move freely within the structures of sports and similar youth movements under voluntary labour. The response both within and outside of sports was the development of rulebased codes of conduct. Into these codes of conduct can be read a moral conservatism; a flight back to the language of moral certainty, of duties, obligations, principles and rules. The task of how we should understand these codes of conduct and what may properly be expected of them in the context of sports coaching is explored in this chapter. In order to effect this task I set out a caricature of professionalism that is partly at odds with the rule-based conceptions of ethics and, utilising the concept of ‘trust’, I attempt to underwrite the notion of sports coach as professional.
