Psychologized approaches to sport coaching research

This chapter provides a review of psychologized approaches to sport coaching research. In particular, it reviews behavioural positions emerging in the 1970s, cognitive and strategic/functional disciplinary positions emerging in the 1990s. The typical approach in behavioural research has been to identify observable coaching behaviours of mainly North American college coaches and correlate them with other variables, such as player and performer experiences, preferences and characteristics, and so on. Cognitive approaches often situate themselves as a response to the behavioural approaches that predated them, and, armed with the thinking and tools of wider cognitive psychology, have pointed to what they believe to be more relevant and useful characteristics for understanding and changing coaching that is cognition. The chapter provides an overview of two main disciplinary approaches aligned to psychology - behavioural and cognitive approaches, and a hybrid strategic/functional approach to describing, explaining and prescribing sport coaching.