Little is known about the ongoing pedagogical strategies adopted by tutors and their impact on coaches' professional development, which limits the ability to support tutor development and the quality of tutoring provisions. Considering the Portuguese sports context, this article explored, from the student-coaches' (SCs) perspective, the most valued pedagogical strategies employed by their tutors, and examined its potential impact on fostering their professional development. Eight SCs participated in this study. Data was gathered through individual written reflective logs and focus-group interviews and examined via thematic analysis. Highlighted pedagogical strategies associated with feeling seen included collaborative training session planning and delivery, and active involvement in competition, while feeling heard involved open communication, assignment of meaningful tasks and using the SC's inputs to support athletes and inform decision-making. Such pedagogical strategies contributed to enhancing SCs' self-confidence, accountability, content-related coaching skills, and professional identity. Key findings provide a foundation for developing tutoring guidelines.
Intrapersonal knowledge is recognised as an important dimension of coaching expertise, yet few studies have examined how it develops through coach education. We aimed to address this gap by identifying mechanisms fostering intrapersonal knowledge development in a Vocational Coach Education Programme (vCEP). Eight coaches participated in this multimethod qualitative study. Coaches reported that the vCEP supported intrapersonal knowledge, particularly professional growth reflected in broadened perspectives and enhanced self-awareness. We also analysed a shift in the focus of reflection, which coaches likewise reported in the interviews. Our analysis showed that social learning and sustained opportunities for reflection were the main contributors to these outcomes. However, we did not find changes in the quality of reflection. We highlight that coach education should be designed to foster rich social learning spaces where uncertainty is engaged and diverse perspectives are expressed and to ensure sustained opportunities for meaningful reflection to support intrapersonal knowledge development.
This paper presents a novel approach to team culture change grounded in organisational and cultural sport psychology. Responding to growing calls for sport psychology practitioners to move beyond individual-level interventions, we offer a framework that views culture as a dynamic, socio-relational phenomenon. Our work embraced a non-reductive, context-sensitive process embedded within the everyday life of a university men's volleyball team, rather than applying linear or deterministic models of change. Drawing on Stoic philosophy as both a conceptual foundation and practical guide, we developed and implemented a culturally integrated program that promoted psychological resilience, personal accountability, and collective mental strength. We describe the five key Stoic principles introduced, the method of delivery, and the cultural shifts observed within the team. We show how embedding philosophical principles within a lived team context can potentially support system-level change.
This study investigates the coach-athlete relationship (CAR) and the mobilisation of emotional competences (EC) in wrestling competition. Using case studies with explicitation interviews, we examined the subjective lived experiences of both coaches and athletes through a psychophenomenological approach. Findings highlight how EC - particularly identification, regulation and expression - are linked to the 3 + 1Cs model, depending on the temporal and contextual dynamics (before, during and after matches). Results reveal that coaches not only regulate athletes' emotions but also strategically manage their own, often limiting expression to avoid negative contagion while fostering confidence and motivation. Athletes, in turn, identify and interpret their coaches' emotional states, showing reciprocity in their respective activities. Beyond enriching the literature, these insights offer practical contributions to coach education by emphasising the importance of EC, at an interpersonal level, in the quality of the CAR, during competition.
In response to calls for further study of real-life environments of coach developers, this research aimed to explore the experiences of coach education tutors (re)developing expertise in practice. Three tutors from an English national sport governing body were observed and video-recorded while delivering a course and subsequently participated in a VSR interview to prompt reflection on practice and discuss the realities of coach education. Following reflexive thematic analysis, using the Model of Expertise (Re)development (MER) as a theoretical framework, the findings suggested that knowledge of course content was a limiting factor in being able to respond to the needs of the coach learners and responding to the environment. Participants also discussed the impactful influence of the co-tutor and their previous biographies on practice. This research furthers the application of the MER to a sport coaching context and suggests features of tutor development that enhance expertise redevelopment.
Whilst substitutes are integral to team sports, their emotional experiences are often overshadowed by a focus on starting athletes. This study explores the emotions of substitutes through the sociological lens of emotion work. Results are presented as an innovative ethnodrama, modelled on the film Inside Out, dramatising the first author's experiences from an international tournament. The narrative portrays the internal conflict between personified emotions-Joy, Anger, Fear, and Sadness-as "Alice" navigates non-selection, bench time, and a brief competitive appearance. An Epilogue incorporates data from coach interviews examining practices used to support substitutes. Findings reveal that substitutes do not merely switch between emotions but engage in continuous, effortful emotion work to manage the dissonance between felt disappointment and the "emotional rules" demanding unwavering team support. We argue these challenges are a structural feature of team sports, offering practical implications for coaches: "backstage" spaces, meaningful bench roles, and humanised communication.
Studies on collective impression management in the sport coaching literature have begun to illuminate the backstage and frontstage techniques used by teams of profes-sional sport coaches. This study is the first to examine team assembly, deployment and alignment building within a neoliberal employment context. Data were generated via participant observation, fieldnotes, and semi-structured interviews. The data were sub-ject to multiple rounds of emic and etic analysis, which were primarily sensitised by Goffman's dramaturgical theorising. Analysis revealed that (1) a neoliberal and contrived approach to team administration produced transient team relations and limited oppor-tunities for alignment building, (2) short-term team associations resulted in cynical, pragmatic and instrumental orientations to staging activities, and (3) teams relied on deception and fabricated lines of action to translate curricula and navigate performativ-ity culture. These findings offer a new agenda for researching practitioner collaboration and a stimulus to refine administrative procedures and role preparation programmes.
In this paper, we present findings from a study of women high-performance sport coaches' experiences of coaching as work, and particularly as precarious work. Guided by a Feminist Political Economy (FPE) framework, self-identified women high-performance sport coaches tracked their daily coaching work in solicited diaries and participated in two semi-structured interviews. Resoundingly consistent across the participants' experiences were their struggles with the many and various demands on their time, and their turn to individualised coping strategies to manage the constant internalised expectations of coaching work alongside other responsibilities. Together, these findings demonstrate the need to understand women high-performance sport coaches' experiences in relation to precarity where the unrelenting and unquestioned investment of one's time in coaching duties is normalised as a prerequisite to being able to work, albeit insecurely, as a high-performance coach.
A feminist coaching pedagogy should be considered as a means of challenging patriarchal coaching practice beyond simply hiring female coaches given its potential to emancipate coaches and coaching from taken-for-granted norms that reinforce and reproduce domination, shame, and neoliberal productivity. Many believe that appointing more female leaders and coaches destabilises the patriarchal culture of coaching and alters the dominant masculine discourse within sport. Alternatively, feminist scholar bell hooks holds that anyone, regardless of gender identity, can reinforce patriarchal norms or pose feminist reimaginations. Using action research, the lead author sought to develop her coaching practice in feminist, hooks-informed ways. In doing so, she became more sensitised to tokenistic and mutual participatory approaches, the pedagogical role of excitement and joy, and deviations from "efficient" traditional coaching practices as central to a contextualised shift in coaching and sport culture.
Female athletes encounter biological challenges, such as puberty and hormonal health, embedded within psychosocial coaching environments. Despite their relevance, these topics remain insufficiently integrated into coach education programmes. This study surveyed 779 coaches in Norway and Sweden to examine perceived knowledge versus the importance of female-specific topics through a biopsychosocial perspective. Results revealed a consistent discrepancy: coaches rated these topics as highly important but reported limited knowledge. Latent profile analysis identified three distinct profiles: "High-Performance but Resource-Limited", "Aware but Underprepared", and "Confident but Unaware," with no significant differences based on coach sex or education. Across profiles, coaches reported limited resource access and a strong need for education regarding how these factors impact communication, training, and well-being. These findings indicate persistent gaps in coach preparedness, highlighting the need for context-sensitive education. Integrating biologically grounded content within a biopsychosocial perspective may strengthen coaching practice and thus enhance female athletes long-term development.
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the coupling of perception and action and resultant practices for supporting the exploration of perceptual motor landscapes (e.g. through representative design). Although perception-action coupling can capably explain the organisation of behaviour and action in some contexts, there are also some noteworthy issues and challenges with its scholarship and application (e.g. within coaching or team-sport environments). With this in mind, this paper initially reviews current evidence and associated issues with perception-action coupling and its mechanisms. From here, we offer proposals for addressing identified limitations. In particular, we contend that a priori planning and preparation are key to optimising the efficacy and operation of perception-action coupling within performance settings. As part of this, we explore whether movement control may be better explained by alternative approaches (e.g. predictive processing) and more effectively facilitated through a wider set of coaching andpsychology tools.
Drawing on Goffman's dramaturgical framework, this study examines collective face-work within a high-performance coaching team, advancing understanding of how coaches' decision-making is collaboratively produced, negotiated, and sustained in practice. The study explored the relationship between collective impression management and three defensive strategies: dramaturgical circumspection, loyalty, and discipline. Data were generated through extensive fieldnotes, professional discussions, semi-structured interviews, and observations across a season-long ethnographic endeavour. Findings revealed how collective performances were planned, managed, and controlled within the coaching context, forming three overlapping themes: (a) "Behind the coaching scenes: an office to think, plan, and rest", (b) "The unwritten solidarity", and (c) "The cap, it's almost a safety blanket". Each theme illustrates how the coaches enacted three defensive strategies to preserve performances during critical moments, whilst revealing episodes of fracture, dissent, and uneven loyalty. Collectively, the findings offer functional accounts of organisational life, challenging bounded conceptualisations of coaches' decision-making.
This paper responds to a long-standing call to understand sports coaching as pedagogy. Against current reductionist and posthumanist tendencies, I argue that coaching should be reconceived as a fundamentally human and pedagogical activity. I develop a philosophical foundation for a humanist approach by drawing on Thomas Fuchs's humanism of embodiment, a humanist theory of sport, and an embodied conception of Bildung. This is integrated with Klaus Prange's theory of operative pedagogy, which identifies showing as the basic pedagogical operation that brings the coach, participant, and sporting matter into meaningful relation. From this humanist and pedagogical stance, coaching emerges as a normative, craft-based, world-centred and affirmative practice marked by uncertainty and risk. By elucidating its essential elements, basic forms and distinguishing features, I seek to articulate a pedagogical core of sports coaching that can sustain sport as a meaningful, ethical, and educative human engagement.
Competition entangles through nearly all aspects of contemporary life. It is inseparable from existence as we humans currently experience it. Yet, like any other conceptual construction, it has inherent potential to become otherwise. The purpose of the present paper is to propose intrapeting as an agential realist becoming of competition. Thinking through agential realism and posthumanist logics, two enmeshed agential cuts are offered. First, inspired by the concept of intra-action, the "com" in competition becomes "intra", creating intrapetition. Second, inspired by the concept of spacetimemattering, the "ition" in intrapetition becomes "ing", creating intrapeting. By agential cutting competition through alternative prefixing and suffixing, intrapeting entangles agential realist relationality and performativity, going from a static noun to a gerund that moves. In creating intrapeting as a relationally performative concept, we the authors propose affirmatively generative futurities for sporting, coaching, and living that are modal, dialethic, paraconsistent, and ententional.
Aware of the need for evidence-based guidelines to support sports organisations in operationalising existing athlete development models, our study responds to Moran, Craig & Collins (2024) call for employing constructs from the field of curriculum studies. Drawing principally on Tyler's (1949) contention that curriculum development should address four questions concerning purpose, content, procedures, and evaluation, we report on a qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis to focus on the views and practices of eight UK-based regional Rugby Union academy managers. Using Tyler's framework to examine the design and development of their respective programmes, three areas arose from the participant accounts: managing dual objectives; coherence, i.e. consistencies and disconnects within their programmes; and how their academies capitalise on existing educational practices. Tyler's (1949) contentions could support talent developers as an evaluative, as well as a complementary planning tool to support the development of more coherent, evidence-informed talent development pathways.
Gender bias among US women tennis coaches, a significantly underrepresented group was examined. Leveraging frameworks on gender bias and systemic barriers for women coaches, a concurrent triangulation design was utilised to gain a more holistic and nuanced understanding of gender bias through a quantitative survey (N = 657) and an open-ended question. Results revealed that higher perceptions of gender bias, specifically lack of acknowledgement, male culture, lack of sponsorship, and glass cliff experiences, were significantly associated with lower job satisfaction. Lack of acknowledgement was a significant predictor of intention to leave coaching within 12 months. Qualitative findings reinforced the pervasive presence of six "glass walls" of gender bias across individual, interpersonal, organisational, and societal levels, embedded in a male-dominated culture. Notably, gender essentialism led women coaches to internalise societal stereotypes; while portraying "feminine" coaching styles as a professional strength, which can constrain career trajectories. Practical implications and future research are suggested.
