ABSTRACT
The lives and experiences of the various coaches examined within this book have revealed some of the complexities and issues of the high performance disability sport coaching landscape. Through critical discourse analysis of the coaches’ stories (guided by the work of Cherney et al., 2015; Fairclough, 1995, 2003; Titscher et al., 2000; Wodak & Meyer, 2015), we have identifi ed a number of prevalent themes and points of congruence in the case studies. While each coach’s story may have been unique with regards to geographic context, the sport/s they focused on, or their career pathways, it is evident that there are shared concerns, experiences and beliefs coaches have about their working contexts and professional identity. As we discuss below, many coaches, for example, spoke in unison about their inherent passion to work with disabled athletes and/or within disability sport. There was also considerable accord with regards to the resource struggles and the utility of employing a wide array of formal and informal support networks. A number of coaches also spoke in harmony about the organisational and broader structural forces (e.g. high performance funding maxims) that were increasingly infl uencing their working lives and career trajectories. In what follows we analyse some of these key themes in the hope that it might bring us closer to understanding coaches’ work and its signifi cance. Our examination of the case studies also enables us to raise a number of considerations about the current state of this specifi c coaching setting and its future challenges. Subsequently, we also consider the collective impact these case studies might have on inspiring change within the industry and improvements in the way other coaches may be better developed and supported.
