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A Nordic Ski Coach’s Learning Journey Towards Creating More Inclusive and Safer Sport

Sara Kramers, Sophie Carrier-Laforte, and Martin Camiré

Competitive youth sport coaches who aim to foster inclusive and safer sport often face challenges from their peers, their organisations, and the sociocultural systems in their contexts. A personal learning coach may support coaches’ critical awareness, reflection, and readiness for working towards changing their youth sport contexts. This study details a 15-month collaboration, as Sara acted as a personal learning coach to support Sophie’s critical praxis as they reflected on social issues and experienced shifts in their coaching towards creating more inclusive and safer sport. Grounded in a narrative inquiry methodology, two virtual interviews and 11 virtual meetings occurred. Sara and Sophie also shared reflections through messages and voice notes and one in-person meeting during one of Sophie’s training sessions. Through time-hopping snapshot vignettes, Sophie’s learning journey is presented as they attempt to figure out what to fight for, grow through discomforts and unknowns, and experience progress. Sophie believed that their “mind shifted” towards becoming a “better coach” throughout the collaboration, developing their critical consciousness to change oppressive social conditions in sport. By sharing insights from the collaboration, the study provides vivid examples of the steps coaches and sport stakeholders can take to become more confident in enacting positive change in sport.

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A Qualitative Exploration of Coaches’ Perceived Challenges and Recommendations Relating to Social Justice in Canadian High School Sport

Evan Bishop and Martin Camiré

Sport can at once promote social justice and reinforce systemic inequities. Considering the influence coaches have on athlete development, research related to coaches’ perspectives on social justice issues is warranted. The purpose of the study was to explore Canadian high school sport coaches’ attitudes towards social justice. An online survey saw 392 coaches respond to six open-ended questions on perceived challenges (three questions; n = 989 responses) and recommendations (three questions; n = 724 responses) related to social justice within their teams, schools, and school boards. A content analysis led to coaches’ responses being classified into three groups: (a) high school sport faces social justice issues (57.38%), (b) no social justice challenges and/or recommendations to share (39.34%), and (c) urgency regarding social justice issues is overblown (3.28%). A reflexive thematic analysis, guided by the critical positive youth development framework, was used to develop several overarching themes, highlighting persistent inequities, a lack of involvement from school boards, missed/ignored social justice issues, and a small group of antisocial justice coaches within the Canadian high school sport system. Considerations for coach education programmes and future research are discussed.

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An Ecological Investigation of Polish Olympic Coaches’ Career Pathways and Their Experiences of Career Transition to Olympic Coaching Roles

Donka Darpatova-Hruzewicz, Piotr Marek, and Kamil Kaminski

Most research on coaching adopts a Western, predominantly Anglo-Saxon, vantage point. This study sought to fill the gap in the literature by providing an Eastern European perspective on transition to high-performance coaching. Ten Polish Olympic coaches were interviewed to glean insights into their career pathways, cumulatively spanning the last three decades. First, using abductive analysis, three patterns of nonlinear career pathways were identified: teacher-track, club-coach track and athlete fast-track. Next, contextual and reflective thematic analyses were employed to examine the environmental constraints affecting role transitions. Consequently, drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model, the Ecological Model for Coach Development was proposed to offer an alternative perspective on career transitions. The findings provide evidence for the situated and relational nature of career transitions as processes occurring in nested environmental contexts. We claim that advancing knowledge on transitions requires not only zooming into coaches’ lived experiences of transitioning in/out of coaching roles, but also zooming out on macrolevel societal transformation processes, historically rooted values and belief systems, as well as mesolevel institutional constraints that steer career pathways and shape experiences. The study’s ecological orientation has the potential to enhance coaching education and practice by accounting for contextual complexity and temporality.

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Exploring Interpretations and Implications of Coaches’ Use of Humour in Three National Paralympic Teams

Danielle Alexander-Urquhart, Marte Bentzen, Göran Kenttä, and Gordon A. Bloom

The purpose of this study was to explore interpretations and implications of head coaches’ use of humour in three national Paralympic teams from the perspective of athletes and integrated support staff. We conducted six focus groups with 19 Paralympic athletes and individual interviews with 10 support staff members across the teams. Our reflexive thematic analysis resulted in two overarching themes that helped us understand how humour influenced feelings of psychological safety in the team environment, as well as considerations or challenges with using humour as a coaching strategy, including miscommunication or misunderstanding. Relational awareness, emotional intelligence, and effective communication were identified as important coaching competencies to consider when implementing humour as a leadership behaviour, particularly in an environment where power differentials of status and disability were present. The study was among the first to explore interpretations and implications of humour as a coaching strategy from athletes and staff in the high-performance parasport context. Coaches who implement humour within their environments are encouraged to reflect on the receivers of the interaction and how to maximise the facilitative rather than debilitative functions of humour as a “double-edged sword” to ultimately promote team satisfaction, well-being, and success.

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Digesting the ISCJ Digest—A Decade in Review

Ian Cowburn, Thomas Mitchell, Sergio Lara-Bercial, and Wade Gilbert

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Creating and Sustaining a High-Performing Tennis Culture

Christine Nash, Miguel Crespo, and Rafael Martínez-Gallego

The coach is identified as a key actor in the development of a high-performing culture in sport, in this case, tennis. Using mixed-methods research design, we investigated the views of the participating high-performance tennis coaches on the International Tennis Federation/Olympic Solidarity coach education and certification programme conducted in Spain, and how they felt their involvement made an impact within their national organisations, by enabling them to develop and implement a coach-created high-performing environment. We collected data using both interview and survey procedures. Our findings from the survey indicated that the participating coaches found the programme to be very helpful to their practice, especially to their long-term tennis development, the structure and organisation of effective tennis programmes, and the implementation of appropriate training methods for their players. Content analysis of the interviews revealed three main themes related to creating a high-performing tennis culture: (a) high-performing environment, (b) deliberate focus on growth and development, and (c) obstacles to creating a tennis culture. We discuss the challenges associated with transferring a successful sports development programme to a different cultural environment and conclude with some key points for effective implementation.

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Developing Close, Trusting Coach–Athlete Relationships With High-Performance Adolescent Tennis Players

Mikaela C. Papich, Gordon A. Bloom, and Lea-Cathrin Dohme

The purpose of this study was to understand why and how experienced tennis coaches developed quality relationships with their high-performance adolescent athletes that prioritized athletes’ needs and well-being. Five highly regarded Canadian tennis coaches of internationally ranked adolescent players engaged in two semistructured interviews and three story completion tasks. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings outlined that coaches unanimously believed establishing a close, trusting relationship with their adolescent athletes was fundamental to creating a caring environment in which empathy for athletes’ athletic, academic, and personal demands could be demonstrated. Coaches also described the difficulties of navigating these close relationships in a climate that is under severe scrutiny because of athlete maltreatment allegations. Examples of coaching behaviors that fostered closeness and maintained athlete safety included demonstrating care towards athletes’ social, emotional, academic, and athletic challenges, encouraging dialogue in which athletes expressed their wants and needs, and involving parents to help maintain transparency regarding the establishment of closeness. Uniquely, this study provides practical suggestions for how coaches can nurture closeness while promoting safe environments that prioritize athletes’ welfare.

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Enriching Player Development in Women’s Futsal in Portugal: A Narrative Account of Case Examples

Fernando Santos, Keith Davids, Rute Carvalho, Corina Rabaça, and Débora Queiroz

In Portugal, women’s participation in futsal, one of the most popular sports in the country, has increased 85.5% in the last decade, growing from 5,406 to 10,028 female participants. The purpose of this critical commentary is to provide insights on current conditions in women’s futsal in Portugal and what we can learn to improve experiences and opportunities for future generations of players as well as to advance new possibilities for research in this field. Based on the authors’ lived experiences and expertise, a narrative account has been developed to showcase athletes’ developmental pathways within the female futsal landscape in Portugal as case examples. This article seeks to provide some novel insights across sport systems concerning the processes and mechanisms through which athlete development in women’s sport can be enriched as well as how research can be used to increase equity and social justice. The narrative accounts can be taken to imply that there is the need to increase meaningful opportunities for the development of female futsal athletes through using more contemporary pedagogical strategies and structures by the futsal organizations. These contemporary pedagogical strategies may focus on variables such as improved coach education offerings, increased number of practice sessions per week, and access to modernized facilities and equipment. Moving forward, system-level changes are needed to impact individual–environment relationships more accurately as well as continue to foster the growth of the sport.

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Reconceptualising Intracareer Transitions as Coach-Becomings: A Rhizomatic Narrative Case Study of an American Basketball Coach

Donka Darpatova-Hruzewicz, Robert T. Book Jr., and Anastasiya Khomutova

This paper offers a poststructuralist exploration of the career transitions of an American basketball coach into and within collegiate basketball. We draw on the theory of Deleuze and Guattari to reconceptualise coaching transitions as coach-becomings contrasted with humanist conceptions of outcome-centred, staged processes. Our nomadic analysis is based on longitudinal interviews and ethnographic data collected over a 4-year period. We adopt narrative rhizomatics and ventriloquism to examine the coaching and institutional assemblages engaged in the production of coaching beliefs and behaviours in specific transition contexts. We also attend to the dialogical and performative aspects of analysis in relation to the role of researchers. Our findings suggest that collegiate environments are conducive to disciplinary coaching practices framed within discourses of masculine militarism and dualist representationalism, thus adversely impacting learning, development, and adaptability in transition. We argue that an alternative conceptualisation of transitions as coach-becomings shifts the focus away from arborescent unitary logic to more creative, nonlinear pedagogies that embrace multiplicity and fluidity. Engaging with the Deleuzian ontology of difference also implies raising awareness of coaching as a social and political practice.

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Coaches’ Provision of Structure for Players’ Competence Development: Perspectives of Professional Soccer Coaches and Players in Norway

Kevin Nicol and Justine B. Allen

Developing athletes’ actual and perceived competence is critical to enhancing performance and considered central to coaching. According to self-determination theory, the provision of competence-supportive structure is critical for psychological need satisfaction, optimal motivation, and well-being. Coaches use of structure such as providing clear expectations, instructional guidance, and feedback are well-established coaching practices; however, little is known about how, and to what extent, these types of structure support or thwart players’ perceptions of competence, particularly in high-performance contexts. Five head coaches working in the highest soccer league in Norway, and three players from each of the participating head coach’s squads (N = 15) participated in semistructured interviews. Through abductive analysis, we generated five themes: structure to promote competence; coaching for competence development; relatedness support as a foundation for effective structure; freedom within structure is useful; and shared ownership of, and with, structure. The findings provide evidence that professional soccer coaches and players in this study desire and deliver structure. It is provided in an autonomy-supportive way and built on a relatedness supportive foundation. This study contributes new insight into the importance of competence-supportive structure in coaching, which coaches and those supporting the development of coaches may find useful.