Practitioner Blog 02: “Raising the bar in Sport Coaching

Jamie Taylor is an assistant professor at Dublin City University, a coach and coach developer. He is also currently coaching rugby union at Midlands Academy (formerly Wasps Rugby) and a Senior Coach Developer at Grey Matters Performance.

Not that long ago, I was involved in a project aimed at shaping their pathway system in a sport. Gathered in a room were a collection of practitioners, aiming for interdisciplinary collaboration. As the meeting began, I inquired, "are we expecting the coaches?", I received a "No", accompanied by a look that suggested the coaching staff would have little to contribute.

This situation underscores the challenges our industry faces in defining the role of coaches and setting aspirations for coaching. Should we lower barriers to entry to ensure that parents can supervise activities on Sunday mornings? Alternatively, should our focus be cultivating the expertise of career professionals? Or, is it possible to achieve both objectives?

At the same time, there's ongoing debate within the literature about which bodies of knowledge coaches should utilize to inform their practice. Coaching research often gravitating towards distinct epistemological communities of practice (North, 2017).

I favour the distinction shown in the figure below, which outlines the various bodies of knowledge that can inform a coach's practice. It also highlights the challenge for coaches in managing this knowledge. Our recent research suggests that no single body of knowledge should be viewed as stable; rather, each should be subject to scrutiny and evolve over time. Moreover, to apply this knowledge effectively in specific contexts, coaches must engage with a considerable level of criticality.

Adapted from (Abraham et al., 2006; Nash & Collins, 2006; Taylor et al., 2023)

For most, the body of knowledge deemed most valuable is technical and tactical (knowledge of the sport). This predilection partly explains why former athletes often find themselves at the front of the queue for coaching positions. However, this tendency also highlights a twofold issue within coaching.

Firstly, reflecting my experiences with the NGB, for many, there is little in the way of a framing for the role of the coach beyond conveying technical and tactical knowledge. Many coaches have been brought within this narrow scope, encouraged to ‘stay in their lane’. Despite sport coaching growing as a research domain, in practice we still have little understanding the role of the sport coach. This leads to circular debates about which bodies of knowledge, areas of expertise, how best to support coaches and what criteria by which to judge coaching quality. Or, in essence, what it is that the coach needs to do. As part of a recent study, a highly experienced coach suggested to me that coaches need “80% of the knowledge of the specialist” (Taylor et al., 2023). That is, coaches need a very significant and broad base from which to inform their work.

Our second issue is how we prepare coaches to develop this base of knowledge. Although less of a trend in the literature, the historical trend was for researchers to point to the inadequacy of coach education. Typically limited to a few weekend courses with little expectation of ongoing engagement in professional development, often devalued by coaches in terms of impact on their practice (Stoszkowski & Collins, 2016).

Contrast this to the comparable pedagogic role of the teacher, which typically starts with an undergraduate degree followed by postgraduate training. Given this disparity, it is striking how low the entry barriers are for coaching and how quickly the responsibility of caring for people’s development in and through sport is assumed.

Another coach pointed out to me that: “the problem we have is that we have lots of excellent coaches, but they are often the least educated person in the room”. Yet, we can’t assume that more letters after a name is equal to better coaching. I have lost track of the number of outstanding coaches I have worked with, but who had no formal education. They had instead winnowed their practice by informally testing practices and learning from others over many years (Stodter & Cushion, 2017). Thus, challenge we face is multi-faceted, we need a better understanding of the development of expertise in sport coaching, the role of the individual and the context of their work.

This appreciation might begin by building a picture of the key challenges faced by coaches in different roles and contexts, helping to develop coaches against these, rather than relying on contextless, generic base level competencies. From this point, consider the weighting of different disciplinary bodies of knowledge and how they need to impact on the coach. In this sense, it might be possible to understand the position of coaching as a discipline and integrate into the broader family of sport science disciplines.

As a practitioner and researcher, I have used Professional Judgement and Decision Making (PJDM) as an approach to applied practice, one that promotes informed decision making based on contextual needs (Martindale & Collins, 2005). Similarly, recent years have seen the growth of evidence informed practice (EIP), as a contrast to the research-centric focus evidence-based practice. EIP embraces a balanced weighting of research, coaching experience, and contextual understanding, allowing for a more adaptable use of evidence in practice. EIP embraces a more balanced distribution of knowledge sources, including research, coaching experience, and situational insights. This broader perspective enables a more adaptable method of incorporating evidence into coaching, aiming to cultivate coaches who are critically informed and can discern how to integrate various elements into their practice effectively. The ideal outcome being a coach who is critically informed and able to see where different elements fit in a complex picture.

This is not a charter for ‘anything goes’, instead a platform for the growth of genuine expertise. Recognising that sport coaching will not move to a model of multiple years of full time development and engagement, it represents a shift towards coach development more interested in lifelong learning and development relative to practice, not ‘did coach education do X, Y, or Z?’ It encourages coaches to stay abreast of research, engage in continuous professional development and critically evaluate their work. It also presents the opportunity for established coaches to take their professional development further, doing in-situ practically grounded research as part of programmes like the Professional Doctorate at DCU.

Raising the bar in coaching through evidence-informed practice offers a genuine promise, but it will require the parallel engagement of sports, researchers and coaches. Fundamentally though, it will require higher expectations for us as coaches, something that I would love to see ISESA involved in.

Jamie is an assistant professor at Dublin City University, a coach and coach developer. He is also currently coaching rugby union at Midlands Academy (formerly Wasps Rugby) and a Senior Coach Developer at Grey Matters Performance. Previous roles include pathway coaching and curriculum lead at the UK Sport Institute and academy head coach at Leicester Tigers. His research interests are in high performance and talent development coaching.

X - @JTGreyMattersUK

LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jamie-taylor

ResearchGate - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jamie-Taylor-13

ORCHID - 0000-0002-9958-0871

References

Abraham, A., Collins, D., & Martindale, R. (2006). The coaching schematic: Validation through expert coach consensus. Journal of Sports Sciences, 24(6), 549–564. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640410500189173

Martindale, A., & Collins, D. (2005). Professional Judgment and Decision Making: The Role of Intention for Impact. The Sport Psychologist, 19(3), 303–317. https://doi.org/10.1123/tsp.19.3.303

Nash, C., & Collins, D. (2006). Tacit Knowledge in Expert Coaching: Science or Art? Quest, 58(4), 465–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/00336297.2006.10491894

North, J. (2017). Sport Coaching Research and Practice: Ontology, interdisciplinarity and critical realism. Routledge.

Stodter, A., & Cushion, C. J. (2017). What works in coach learning, how, and for whom? A grounded process of soccer coaches’ professional learning. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 9(3), 321–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2017.1283358

Stoszkowski, J., & Collins, D. (2016). Sources, topics and use of knowledge by coaches. Journal of Sports Sciences, 34(9), 794–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2015.1072279

Taylor, J., Ashford, M., & Jefferson, M. (2023). High Performance coach cognition in the wild: Using Applied Cognitive Task Analysis for practical insights – cognitive challenges and curriculum knowledge. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1154168