ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to overview a positive view of professionalisation that contrasts with recent positions offered, notably, by T. Cassidy, R. L. Jones, and P. Potrac and J. Lyle and C. J. Cushion. It focuses on coaching change as a broader systemic improvement process enabled by the mobilisation of resource, notably, through state intervention, linked to increasing understanding of the value of coaching. The literature on the professionalisation of sport coaching can be separated into three broad areas: first, policy documentation, and semi-policy/semi-academic ‘research’ or documentation. Second, a more critical academic literature that has analysed these policy ideas. Third, an academic literature that has attempted to provide an alternative positive view of what professionalisation may look like – often linked to notions of professionalism. Professionalisation, viewed as centralised attempts to change coaching education, is criticised in a way that will be familiar to readers of the sociologically informed literature.
