ABSTRACT
Encouraging coaches to explicitly engage with ethical and philosophical concepts continues to be a challenge. Yet, coaches are regularly required to make decisions and behave in ways that are implicitly or explicitly informed by, and reflect, their values, moral and ethical perspectives as well as philosophical orientations. While sports coaches are rarely academic philosophers there is some merit in coaches exploring philosophical thought and concepts. It is acknowledged that an interplay occurs between philosophy, ethics, morals and values. In this chapter, we foreground philosophical discussion in an attempt to recognise the social interactions and the cultural contexts in which coaching practices occur. As such attention is turned to discussing a pragmatic response to sports philosophy, which has the potential to make a contribution to the discussions on philosophy of sports coaching by enabling “more thoughtful practices, not creating more practical thinking”, which reflects “Dewey's pragmatic view of philosophy” (Elcombe, 2018, p. 331).
