ABSTRACT
Models of the coaching process such as that developed by John Lyle (1998) attest to the complex nature of the coaching role. For example, the role of the sports coach involves considerably more than instruction in the specific sport skills that form the basis of the particular game or activity. There are also some important distinctions between elite coaching, high performance coaching and coaching a junior sport team of under-12s. One is that the junior coach typically is responsible for all the skills training him/herself, whereas the elite senior coach will often have a specialist skills coach to do the pedagogy for physical activity. Another difference between coaching situations is the number of players/athletes for whom the coach is responsible. An elite level artistic gymnastics coach may have a small number of athletes in her charge whereas a junior level football coach might have a squad of 30 to work with. The pedagogies appropriate for one group of athletes might not be best for the other. In this chapter I will discuss pedagogies of youth sport and elite sport as well as comment on the ways in which pedagogy is represented in the various popular texts on sports coaching. I will then make a somewhat divergent, but I consider relevant, connection between the pedagogical focus on motor skill learning and the lessons from the HMS sub-discipline of motor learning.
