Coaching Children in Sport

Ian Stafford, Ian Stafford

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136964077
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Physical Education

All coaches working with children will know that they differ substantially from adults in their capabilities, capacity for development and in their ability to meet the demands that sport places upon them. Coaching Children in Sport provides an up-to-date, authoritative and accessible guide to core knowledge and coaching skills for anybody working with children in sport.

Written by a team of leading international coaching experts, teachers, psychologists and specialists in children's issues in sport and health, the book explains why children should not be treated as mini-adults in sport and helps coaches to devise effective ways of working that not only achieve results but also take into account the best interests of the child. It examines key topics such as:

• fundamental coaching skills
• coaching philosophies and models
• children's physical and psychosocial development
• children's motivation
• safeguarding and child protection issues and coaching ethics
• sport and children's health
• talent identification and high performance coaching
• reflective practice in sports coaching.

Including case studies, practical reflective activities and guides to further reading throughout, Coaching Children in Sport is an essential text for all courses and training programmes in sports coaching. It is also vital reading for all students, teachers and practitioners working with children in sport, physical education or developmental contexts.

PART I ON COACHING

DOI: 10.4324/9780203850688-2

CHAPTER ONE WHAT IS A COACH AND WHAT IS COACHING?

JOHN LYLE

DOI: 10.4324/9780203850688-3

CHAPTER OUTLINE

• How have the boundaries been drawn to date?
• The social space of coaching
• Distinctive domains
• Adopting a position: a summary
• Learning more

INTRODUCTION

Despite the self-evident significance of the question in the title of this chapter, it is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. We could simply adopt a position that accepts a sports coach as an individual who occupies a coaching role – but that would not resolve the issue of whether the role itself could be understood as ‘coaching’. Definitions rarely do more than identify the core function of the activity or role. On the other hand, the concept of coaching and understanding the ‘boundaries’ that are implied in our use of the term have implications that go far beyond a mere definition. This is why what may seem like a rather ‘dry’ or boring question will take us into the realms of coach education, professionalisation, expectations about the coach's role, coach–athlete relationships, and the expectations of athletes.

Although there is a danger of reprising the arguments that will be developed throughout the chapter, it will be obvious that the professionalisation of sport coaching (Taylor and Garratt, 2010; sports coach UK, 2008) depends on being able to identify what the occupation consists of (what do coaches do that others cannot do?) and who should be included and excluded (how can we tell whether a ‘coach’ qualifies for the profession?). As the writers on professions express it, there will be a body of knowledge and skills that is particular to sports coaching. The expertise that this confers is what coaches ‘profess’, and for which they can be held accountable. Much of the debate may be focused on relatively narrow, arcane matters about threshold levels of expertise and distinctive role functions, but coaches occupy a social ‘space’ (by this I mean that they inhabit real roles that we can see and understand), and issues of esteem, career development and reward will be impacted by the boundaries that we choose to draw around coaching.

The title of this book is Coaching Children in Sport. Why did the editor use the term ‘coaching’ and not ‘teaching’ or ‘instructing’? Did he mean the use of the term to imply a particular purpose, approach, set of behaviours or set of values? Did it mean that he included some topics and excluded others because of this? Perhaps it was a combination of these criteria, or perhaps there were assumptions built into the term that were simply not questioned. I am sure that he was well aware of these issues, but the reason I raise the questions is to highlight the objectives for the chapter. Having considered the propositions in the chapter, you should feel able to evaluate critically, and with reasoned argument, others’ use of the terms ‘coach’ and ‘coaching’.

HOW HAVE THE BOUNDARIES BEEN DRAWN TO DATE?

It is very tempting to begin by saying, ‘not very well’ and ‘most people don’t bother’. Indeed, it may seem an unnecessary exercise, because you feel that the use of the term ‘coach’ is obvious, non-contentious or taken for granted. However, we should examine carefully anything that appears to be taken for granted. The most useful starting point is the variety of ways in which the term ‘coach’ has been understood to date. The following examples illustrate a number of different approaches, with some implications attached.

The most common approach is to apply the term ‘coach’ in association with the generic purpose of improving sporting performance (performance when used in this context refers to any level or stage of sporting ability), or exerting any leadership role associated with a team or athlete. This is difficult to illustrate because of its ubiquity, but the lack of precision means that this generic usage is not helpful. Perhaps understandably, another approach is ‘assumption by named role’. In other words, if an individual has the title ‘coach’, they must be coaching. Examples would be coaches in schools and colleges in North America, ‘community coaches’ in the United Kingdom and coaches associated with representative teams or squads. This is not unreasonable but has its dangers. No presumption can be made about the coach's practice, and there are no threshold criteria. Coaches often exercise a multiplicity of roles, and there is some prestige in ‘badging’ oneself as a coach.

An obvious mechanism for identifying coaches is to check whether they are ‘certificated’ – that is, have a coach education qualification recognised by a national agency. The issue is that these qualifications range from the minimal (two or three days) to the fairly extensive. Expertise is minimally assured by these qualifications, and, of course, no assumptions can be made about the coaches’ subsequent practice. A lack of certification would not disqualify a person from being considered a coach, but it does convey a measure of quality assurance, and may impact on professional recognition. On the other hand, it may seem surprising to identify ‘self-designation’ – I think I’m a coach, therefore I am! In a survey of coaches in the United Kingdom (MORI, 2004), the guidance provided to survey respondents was ‘an individual that is involved in providing coaching’. Whether or not an individual is to be ‘counted’ as a coach was left to the respondent's interpretation of the term ‘coaching’. In the elaboration (ibid.: 2), the survey intends that ‘those who might coach their friends on a casual basis’ should be included. Readers may feel that this suggests a threshold for occupying the social space that is not sufficiently related to expertise, certification or practice.

There have been some attempts to argue that the coaching process itself should be identified as a means to circumscribe the use of the term ‘coach’. The most comprehensive of these is that by Lyle (2002), who identifies a number of ‘boundary criteria’ that can be applied to an individual's practice, including stability, frequency of contact, intensity of engagement, goal orientation and planned progression. It is important to note that these are a means of differentiating between coaching roles, not a prescription for practice.

These different approaches confuse role, expertise, experience, purpose or function, and context. A useful mechanism to illustrate the potential implications of this variation is the sample populations used by researchers. The student who reads a series of papers on coaching may be forgiven for assuming that ‘coaching’ or ‘coach’ could be assumed to convey a consensual meaning. However, nothing could be further from the truth. A useful exercise to illustrate this is to review a series of research papers and examine the coach population samples used. In passing, you might note that research papers most often identify the coaches and their characteristics rather than their coaching practices, which would be far more valuable.

REFLECTION

No criticism is intended of the sample populations used for any individual paper. However, you are invited to read those identified and other similar papers and to consider two issues: (1) the extent to which such a range of populations and circumstances can be expected to generate findings that translate well to coaching more widely; and (2) the extent to which authors contextualise their findings.

Suggested papers: Côté and Sedgwick (2003), Erickson et al. (2007), Gilbert and Trudel (2001), Trudel et al. (2007) and Vergeer and Hogg (1999).

Your review will identify a wide range of characteristics: number of coaches, employment status, gender balance, experience, role, sports coached, and athletes’ stage of performance development. One might be critical of the extent to which generalisations from findings in such papers are sufficiently limited to the populations being used. The range of ages, experience, coach education, role deployment, and performance level and motives of athletes coached is very broad and reinforces my arguments about the ‘family of distinctive coaching roles’.

It is important to acknowledge that an extensive range of perspectives or ‘lenses’ can be adopted to portray sports coaching. There is no space to elaborate on these, but one should recognise a sociological lens (Jones 2000), humanistic lens (Kidman 2005), performance lens (Johns and Johns, 2000), pedagogical lens (Armour, 2004) and functional lens (Lyle, 2002). Bush (2007) has described four approaches: psychological, modelling, sociological, and pedagogical. When Jones states that ‘at the heart of coaching lies the teaching and learning interface’ (2006: 3), he is illustrating the use of a particular perspective. A similar argument is the advocacy of a ‘holistic’ approach to coaching (Cassidy et al., 2009). A useful exchange of ideas can be viewed in papers in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching (Cushion, 2007a, b; Lyle, 2007). This provides a flavour of the argument about the balance of emphasis between the relative complexity and untidiness of much of sports coaching, with a dependence on an intervention management practice that requires continual adjustment, and the stability of a core process of planned intervention.

Côté and Gilbert (2009) review conceptual models of coaching and identify a number of perspectives from which these have been generated: leadership, expertise, coach–athlete relationships, motivation and education. They make a convincing case for three ubiquitous components in these models: coach's knowledge, athletes’ outcomes and coaching contexts. However, the question raised is whether, given the extensive variation and interrelationship of these generic components, they can be anything other than useful descriptors of coaches’ practice; they do not help us to delineate common purpose or practice within the family of sports coaching roles. In the component ‘athletes’ outcomes’, they argue a case for four desirable outcomes; these are the 4 Cs, described elsewhere (see the 5 Cs described in Chapter 17 and Côté et al., 2010): competence, confidence, connection and character/caring. The authors state that ‘effective coaching should result in positive change’ (Côté and Gilbert, 2009: 313) in these outcomes. We may well agree with this position, at least in youth sport. Nevertheless, we need to ask whether it describes an essential feature of coaching, or whether it is a value position. For example, in operationalising the concepts, the authors identify the adoption of ‘an inclusive focus as opposed to an exclusive selection policy based on performance’ (ibid.: 317) as a potential criterion. Once again, this may characterise desirable practice in one or more coaching domains, but it cannot be an essential characteristic of coaching practice. I do not cease to be a coach if I operate a contrary policy.

REFLECTION

These different perspectives on coaching may be more about changes in priorities, applications in context, and intended outcomes, rather than substantive disagreements about the role of the coach. Nevertheless, I urge you to read any research papers or book chapters with a critical interpretation of the lens being used, and recognise the level of prescription – the extent of the ‘ought’ or ‘should’ language being employed. Review the most recent four papers you have read. What ‘lens’ is being used? Can you identify other papers by the same author(s) that adopt this approach? Identify the assumptions being made about t...