ABSTRACT
Coaches’ decision-making has been identified as a key element of coaches’ practice. Nevertheless, attempts at a theoretical underpinning as a legitimate basis for empirical work are a relatively part of coaching science and reflect a greater attention to the cognitive aspects of expertise. Decision-making may be defined as ‘making discretionary judgements’, which Beckett identifies as the distinguishing feature of professional activity, or ‘committing oneself to a course of action’. Decisions are classified in a number of ways, depending on their immediacy and automacy. It is important to acknowledge that coaches’ decision-making, although there may be some commonalities, is distinguished from the dynamic decision-making of sport performers. The domain-specific decision-making process in sport coaching to which attention needed to be directed concerned the relatively time-pressured interventions in training and competition – an emergent dynamic, serial, and ‘nested’ practice.
