ABSTRACT
Julie is an experienced coach who has coached in primary schools, voluntary sports clubs, university sports and major international competitions. Throughout this time, Julie has learnt from experience, formal coach education and non-formal coach education such as conferences. This has been beneficial for Julie, because throughout her career, she has faced challenging care issues. Most notably, as a younger coach, Julie struggled to care for an athlete who overtrained. More recently, Julie has cared for an athlete with an eating disorder and done so in a proactive, informed and collective manner. These instances are significant problems in the lives of athletes, yet the coaching literature has too few accounts of how coaches respond to these challenges. Julie’s story is therefore novel in that it explores these issues from the contextualised perspective of a case study coach. In doing so, Julie’s study raises concerns about how coaches are educated to care and how they work with others, such as medical professionals, to care. Accordingly, Julie’s story is analysed further with reference to coach education and the sport medicine literature. Significant questions are raised from these analyses for coaches, coach educators and coach researchers to consider.
