Coaching Cultures

Neil Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415594080
• eBook ISBN: 9781317983149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Coaches are amongst the most visible figures in sport today but little is known about the history of their profession.

This book examines the history of coaching from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. It uses a number of sports as case studies that includes: cricket, swimming, rugby union, athletics, football and tennis. The focus is largely English but international examples are used to illuminate the British context.

A number of themes are explored. Initially, in the 1800s, the coach was like an artisan who learned his skills on the job and coaching was similar to a craft. Early coaches were professionals but from the late nineteenth century an amateur elite governed British sport, who inhibited and in some sports banned coaching. As the twentieth century progressed, though, different sports at different stages began to embrace coaching as international competition intensified. In addition, the nature of coaching changed as a more scientific and managerial approach was applied. Finally, in football, the export of early British coaches is examined in light of the migration of international athletes and also as a process of 'knowledge transfer'.

This book was published as a special issue of Sport in History.

Introduction

Neil Carter

I think probably the worst thing that could have happened to us, and maybe people’ll disagree, is winning the World Cup in ’66 because suddenly, out of the closet, every man and his dog became a coach, and they got this badge by going to Lilleshall. I know everybody can’t be a professional footballer, but everybody can be a coach. But, I’ll tell you what, one hour with an ex-professional footballer of note is worth 1,000 hours of somebody who has got no experience of football, because the knowledge of the game is at the grassroots.¹

The above statement from the former Liverpool footballer Tommy Smith was typical of attitudes towards coaching in British sport for much of the twentieth century. This thinking had traditionally been determined not only by an antipathy towards it among professionals but also by an amateur tradition in which coaching was regarded as a dirty word. However, coaching is now perceived very differently. Discussing the virtues of coaches (or managers to football fans) and coaching, for example, has become part of the popular sporting discourse, while the state has begun to invest in coaching, not just at the elite level of sport but also at the grass roots where it sees coaching having an educational and social service role.

What does this mean and how does the history of coaching relate to the history of sport in general? The historiography of coaching is surprisingly sparse. While there is a mountain of popular biographies and autobiographies on coaches, especially football managers, there is little academic work on the subject.² One avenue to explore is to see coaching as a process of ‘knowledge transfer’. Historians of medicine are keen to remind us that ideas and knowledge are subject to their cultural and social context,³ and coaching in sport has been no different. Mike Huggins has argued that ‘[t]he course of British sporting history can… be conceptualized in terms of cultural diffusion, appropriation and exchange, and struggles for ascendancy between value systems that variously competed, coexisted, negotiated or cooperated’.⁴ The various contributions to this issue indicate how coaching not only reflected but also helped to shape the sporting environment. Importantly, coaches have exercised a large influence over their sport both socially and in sporting terms. Through their attitudes to coaching, which had been moulded by their own backgrounds, coaches have transmitted values to athletes and shaped the way that sports have been played.

Although the origins of coaching can be traced back to the Greek Olympics, here we are concerned with the period from the early nineteenth century. The actual term ‘coach’ can be broadly interpreted as referring to an individual responsible for training others for an athletic contest and ‘coaching’ as preparing an athlete for competition. This preparation usually has a technical component that involves the acquisition and mastery of skills and techniques. In the preparation of athletes, the role of the coach can encompass the responsibilities of a technician, trainer, tactician and psychologist, depending on its extent and range. Essentially, the prime attributes of a coach are specialist knowledge of the activity combined with motivational skills and an ability to communicate effectively. In this sense, ‘coaching’ can be applied to other situations in which individuals impart specialist knowledge to others. As a consequence, the term ‘coaching’ is being constantly re-interpreted, something that has been highlighted by its increasing use in business and in so-called ‘life coaching’.

As coaching has several distinct characteristics that align it closely with teaching, it is unsurprising that, at the beginning of the 1800s, ‘coaching’ was a colloquial expression for a private tutor who prepared candidates for examinations. During the nineteenth century sportsmen began to apply this language to their own sphere of activity. The link with education is important. When coaching became associated with preparation for competitive events it was in those sports, such as rowing and cricket, most closely associated with the public schools and universities. ‘Coach’ was not widely used in working-class sports, where the term ‘trainer’ survived almost intact in pedestrianism, pugilism, cycling and wrestling. It was only from the late 1860s that ‘coach’ began to appear in connection with working-class sports. While the Victorians distinguished between trainers and coaches on the grounds of class, these terms have never been precisely defined or mutually exclusive. Rowing coaches, for example, refined techniques and planned physical training programmes while professional trainers normally looked after skills development as well as fitness. Due to this blurring of the boundaries regarding the preparation of athletes for competitive performance, ‘coach’ became interchangeable with the word ‘trainer’.⁵ In more recent years, with particular reference to association football in Britain, ‘coach’ and ‘manager’ have increasingly come to be interchangeable due to the influence of international football.

Attitudes and approaches to coaching have not only been culturally specific but have also differed from nation to nation. Distinctive coaching cultures have been generated by a number of factors. These have included varying levels of sporting competition and commercialization and the extent of state intervention as well as differing attitudes to medicine and the body. In Europe, for example, there was a longer tradition (than in Britain) of physical training and gymnastics, which had links with the military, and ramifications for body culture. Given its reputation in physiology, it was perhaps unsurprising that Germany was a leader in sports science and some early German coaches were scientists. In France, professional cyclists had support in the form of their personal soigneurs. They offered a mix of sound advice and old wives’ remedies relating to training, diet and lifestyle; they also supplied massage, medical support, a sympathetic ear, and, sometimes, drugs.⁶ In Ireland, attitudes towards coaching were framed by the nature of its sports. While soccer was barely semi-professional the other main sports – Gaelic football, hurling and rugby union – were firmly rooted in the amateur tradition. These circumstances – combined with the state’s ‘hands off’ approach to sport – inhibited the development of a national coaching culture.⁷

It was in North America that the role of the coach developed most rapidly. Again, the link with education is important because this process was largely shaped by inter-varsity sporting rivalries. In addition, American universities provided an environment conducive to coaching innovation, especially in sports such as athletics and rowing. From the late nineteenth century, however, the emphasis on coaching was most pronounced in college football, and coaches gradually gained more control over the game as it developed decade by decade. Early coaches were usually graduates returning on a voluntary basis to train the new eleven. With early college football dominated by the Ivy League’s ‘Big Three’ of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, it was at Yale that this practice was pioneered despite some initial opposition from true-blue amateurs. Walter Camp, Yale’s ‘coach’ for nearly thirty years from the 1880s and ‘The Father of American Football’, was especially influential. Some of the expectations of a coach were based on his idea that football was about tactics and leadership rather than physical achievement. In addition, through his writings on the game Camp helped to define the idea and function of the coach.⁸ Later, Knute Rockne became the game’s first celebrity coach. This was partly due to his success with the ‘Fighting Irish’ of Notre Dame but importantly also because he cultivated good relations with sports writers and journalists, thus ensuring maximum publicity.⁹ This in turn, helped to reinforce the idea that the coach was the important figure in the game. Between 1920 and 1960, there were no fewer than 120 films about American Football, a number of which revolved around the ‘coach’. Most famous was Ronald Reagan’s 1940 portrayal of Rockne in Knute Ruckne – All American. It was in this biopic that his ‘win one for the Gipper’ line not only became part of the game’s folklore but was to be re-employed by Reagan to good effect over forty years later when running for president.

This special issue is mainly concerned with coaching in England and covers the peirod from the early nineteenth century up to the late twentieth century. The range of sports examined includes: cricket, swimming, rugby union, athletics, football and tennis.

An important theme of this issue is that it highlights, perhaps contrary to popular perceptions, that Britain has a long and varied coaching tradition. One of the earliest sports to employ coaching on a widespread basis had been cricket. This had important implications not only for how the sport was played – and for its popularity – but also for cricket’s changing social and economic relations. Rob Light outlines how the skills learned by early cricket coaches owed much to the artisan tradition of the nineteenth-century working classes, which was not dissimilar to learning a trade ‘on the job’. The role of early professional cricketers was later crucial in the transfer of knowledge and cricketing skills into the public schools and universities, which were occupied by the social elites. However, as the gentleman-player distinction came to shape the structure of the game, despite their role in tutoring amateurs, the status of the professional would decline.

Initially, coaching was largely a ‘bottom up’ process, which, while acknowledging contemporary attitudes towards popular medicine and the body, was built on an empirical tradition. As Dave Day shows, using the example of swimming, such methods, as employed by ‘traditional’ coaches from the 1800s onwards, were part of an oral tradition where others learnt by ‘stealing with the eyes’. Information was passed on within tight social networks and was not chronicled for fear of giving rival coaches an advantage. The swimming ‘professor’ Frederick Beckwith exemplifies this tradition. But, as Day also explains, coaching was not the sole source of their income. Many professional coaches, like Beckwith, looked also to commercial ventures, which in his case involved putting on swimming demonstrations.

Almost inevitably, amateurism hangs heavy over coaching in British sport. This tension between amateurism and coaching was dramatized in the film Chariots of Fire (1981). In particular, the role of athletics coach Sam Mussabini can be seen in the context of wider social relations as well as the clash between the values of amateurism and professionalism. These tensions are particularly evident in this issue as the focus is largely on pre-1960 when the amateur hegemony was at its peak.¹⁰ Initially, to distance amateurs from professionals, who were tainted by filthy lucre, coaching was if not banned then certainly frowned upon. This tension overlaps a number of the articles here but it also reveals complex attitudes towards coaching by the amateur hierarchy in different sports. Here the historical context is important. Light, for example, shows how in cricket a number of leading amateur players, such as C.B. Fry, received coaching from former professionals employed at elite public schools. In contrast, in 1895, to distance itself from the now professional Northern Union, the Rugby Football Union deemed any club employing a ‘paid coach or trainer’ to be ‘professional’. These complexities were reinforced by a developing coaching literature, which also highlighted a shift away from old-style trainers and their oral traditions towards those who were part of the burgeoning managerial middle classes from the inter-war years.

The contributions by Carter (athletics), Lake (tennis) and Collins (rugby union) further highlight how the development of coaching differed from sport to sport. There were, however, some important similarities. Growing anxieties over the perceived decline in the national sporting performance prompted many sports to develop organized coaching set-ups. Neil Carter shows how coaching in athletics took on a greater significance with the expansion of international competition, in particular the Olympics, from the early 1900s to 1939. With national prestige increasingly at stake and the reality of the diminution of Britain’s sporting status, the Amateur Athletic Association increasingly saw a greater investment in coaching as an antidote to this malaise, although the context for this attitude changed throughout the period. These anxieties were further underlined after the Second World War and were explored in detail in the Wolfenden Report (1960).

While athletics had a long coaching tradition to fall back on, lawn tennis and rugby union were largely Victorian inventions and as such had none. However, each would gradually develop its own culture. Tony Collins argues that English rugby union was especially resistant to coaching and that this was linked to its specific location in the social hierarchy. In particular, attitudes to coaching were driven by the values of the middle classes. Initially, English rugby was thought of as a player’s game but, as the middle classes embraced managerialism and the game became more competitive, coaching was fully accepted by the 1990s. Coaching in lawn tennis was similarly subject to wider social processes. Robert Lake argues that during the inter-war years the growth in the number of tennis clubs created a more egalitarian and competitive climate within the sport. In addition, the growth of professionalism and anxieties over the decline of British tennis all contributed to a shift towards a greater emphasis on coaching, something that was highlighted by a growing literature on the subject.

It is important, however, to locate the British experience within a wider context. Alison Wrynn’s article offers a different perspective to the English experience. While competition was a driving factor, coaching in American sport, in this case athletics, took a more scientific direction. American coaches, unlike their British counterparts, were more willing to apply scientific knowledge to their coaching methods. Ironi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A ‘Strange … Absurd … and Somewhat Injurious Influence’? Cricket, Professional Coaching in the Public Schools and the ‘Gentleman Amateur’ Ethos
• 3. London Swimming Professors: Victorian Craftsmen and Aquatic Entrepreneurs
• 4. From Knox to Dyson: Coaching, Amateurism and British Athletics, 1912-1947
• 5. Stigmatized, Marginalized, Celebrated: Developments in Lawn Tennis Coaching, 1870-1939
• 6. Amateurism and the Rise of Managerialism: The Case of Rugby Union, 1871-1995
• 7. The Athlete in the Making: The Scientific Study of American Athletic Performance, 1920-1932
• 8. Football’s Engineers? British Football Coaches, Migration and Intercultural Transfer, c.1910-c.1950s
• Index