ABSTRACT
The research policy community in sport has undervalued research into coaches and coaching, with the result that the place of coaching studies in the academic world has been compromised. Earlier chapters have demonstrated that the weight of research studies and the level of conceptual and theoretical development have had relatively little impact on education or professional development, and appear marginalised in the research community. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to advocate an emergent and developed interest in research into sports coaching and to demonstrate that the building blocks of a research agenda are in place. The ideas are distilled from experience of researching into sports coaching, writing and speaking about coaching, working in coach education, being a coach and having a particular academic interest in developing conceptual frameworks. This is aggregated into a personal perspective on the coaching process and on research into sports coaching. It is not a review of literature, nor a summing up of existing research. It is a set of ideas – intended to be coherent – about a research agenda for sports coaching.
