ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how to ethically evaluate coaches, and discusses objectivity and relativism in the evaluation of coaching. In a consideration of coaching ethics, Jeffrey Fry provides several examples of how Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative might apply. The chapter considers a few illustrations based on Fry's scenarios. The chapter suggests that an interpretive or broad internalist approach, especially one that regards competitive sport as a mutual quest for excellence through challenge, provides a defensible overall account of the value of athletic competition. This brings out the educational aspects of competitive sport as an activity that values overcoming challenge for its own sake but also helps promote and illustrate the values and the self-knowledge that enable one to succeed in such a mission. On such a view, the role of the coach is interpretive; on the broad internalist view, the best theory of the coach's role is the one coaches ought to adopt.
