Coaching practice as discovering performance: the wild contingencies of coaching

ABSTRACT

While an enduring concern within coaching research has been to duly appreciate the importance of context, the tendency has been to treat context merely as a resource for analysis, rather than as irredeemably tied to situated practices of members. It is from this latter ethnomethodological position this study respecifies discovery work in coaching as an ordinary organisational achievement of coaches. To detail the artful practices of coaches’ discovery work, the study draws upon a corpus of approximately 20-hours of audio-visual recordings of football training sessions and match-day footage, combined with first-person embodied accounts of coaching. The examples comprise creating joint attention, accelerations of established problems, improving discovery, and silence in discovery. In this sense, rather than treat coaching as an imposed system, discovery work remains an ordinarily structured yet locally emergent and on-going procedure that coaches use to collaboratively establish a shared perception of the athletes’ performance and development.

KEYWORDS:

• Coaching
• discovery
• discovery practices
• ethnomethodology
• instruction

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Dr. Giolo Fele for organising a workshop on ethnomethodology and sport, from which this project emanated. Thank you also to Dr. K. Neil Jenkings for contributing valuable feedback and constructive comments on multiple drafts of this paper. Thank you to the three anonymous reviewers for taking time to thoroughly review this work and provide exceptional feedback. Finally, thank you to the coaches and players for their contribution, but especially for supporting this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Thank you to the anonymous reviewer for helping to distinguish the ethnomethodological sense of the term reflexivity used.

2. All the participants revealed in the screenshots, even when blurred, were shown the images used in this article and subsequently agreed to their use.