ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts a slightly different approach to how we have approached the process of updating. We felt that coaching expertise had become a current topic in the sport coaching literature (Collins et al. 2015; Nash et al. 2012; Gilbert & Côté 2013), and John Lyle had recently compiled a paper for UK Sport1 that examined the concept of expertise as it applied to performance coaching, and as a precursor to identifying coach development programme principles. This discussion paper was compiled by distilling the views of a group of experienced coach developers,2 bringing a degree of experienced interpretation and order to this corpus of opinion, and informing the process by evaluating the contribution of the academic literature to date. Each of the interviews was based on a literature-informed agenda of expertise-related questions, but more resembled a one-to three-hour conversation. The composition of the group and the organising agency orient the starting point to ‘high-performance sport’, although we will inevitably deal with the issue of whether the expertise identified applies to all coaching domains. We first examine the developers’ views and then present an interpretive summary, followed by a series of questions and issues for discussion. You should note that the purpose of the paper was to stimulate debate about important concepts in coaching; it is therefore deliberatively polemic in nature.
