ABSTRACT
The term ‘culture’ is widely, and indiscriminately, used in sports coaching, that is, ‘team culture’, ‘club culture’, ‘culture of the sport’. Additionally, overhauling a ‘toxic culture’ or ‘poor culture’ is often given as the rationale for conducting a review of a sports organisation or coaching practices. In this chapter, we challenge the use of dictionary type definitions of culture because they do ‘not necessarily tell us how culture matters’ (Raeff et al., 2020, p. 297, emphasis added). We draw on Hammersley's (2019) concept of culture as a meaning-making process, which enables culture to be recognised as dynamic and operating in an intersectional and relational manner. The chapter uses two contemporary narratives to illustrate what viewing culture as a meaning-making process looks like in the context of sports coaching.
