ABSTRACT
The origins of this book lay in our respective sports coaching experiences, watching others coach and reflecting upon how we coached ourselves. Between us, we’ve coached along the spectrum, from children’s primary school teams, through professional age-group sport, to national squads at international competitions. Although the context tended to dictate action, what remained constant was our common struggle with the complexity of trying to influence, teach and inspire others to improved performances. Through serendipitous encounters we eventually came to share academic ideas and careers. Initially, our talk was of mutual dissatisfaction with the reductionist treatment of sports coaching by other scholars. It just didn’t ring true; a sentiment constantly thrown at us by other coaches. We had no reply, except to agree timidly. Acknowledging that it was easy to criticise from the sidelines, we began to try to do something about it, which led to a sociological investigation of sports coaching. Why the social emphasis? No doubt, this was influenced by our largely social scientific backgrounds. Of greater importance, however, was our burgeoning belief that sports coaching is, above all, an interactive, communal endeavour; a social practice. Of course, coaches must plan sensitively, continually developing and communicating their sport-specific expertise, and manage the physical environment carefully and decisively. Overriding such concerns, however (a point we reached through experience), was how to generate the appropriate relationships with athletes so that they would trust our requests and demands as coaches. Questions of significance related not so much to which exercises to use, but what to say to whom, when and how? What would be the consequences of such actions? And is the social cost worth it? Within our coaching, every utterance seemed to count; every gesture had an effect in terms of securing, maintaining or losing the respect of those we wanted to influence. We came to realise what we perhaps already knew: that coaching happens in our ‘comings and goings, our givings and gettings’ with athletes (Lemert, 1997). What mattered then, and what our coaching relied on, was what Lemert (1997: x) described as our ‘social competencies’; our basic social logic of how to get things done; the ‘tugging, hinting, proposing, judging, punishing, comforting, depriving and frightening’ of our charges, both
pro-and re-actively, so that they would learn and absorb what we deemed was important. We also came to recognise that coaching was less about us as heroes or villains, and more about how we managed the pressures, constraints and possibilities of context (Stones, 1998b).
