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

Introduction

A stubborn point of debate within the coaching literature has been to appreciate the complexity of coaching practice, with the backdrop of this debate concerning how models, or other reductionist types of analysis, capture the contextual purpose and particularities of coaching practice (see Cushion, 2007 for a fuller critique). Reinitiating this debate, Cope, Cushion, Harvey, and Partington (2022) recently (re)asserted the value of systematic observation as a pedagogical tool that can support coaches to better understand their behaviours and practices. The argument suggested systematic observation might be used intra-individually, in a way that does not “iron out” context through generalised cause and effect claims (Cope, Cushion, Harvey, & Partington, 2022). Meanwhile, critical scholars have critiqued such an approach for assuming coaches’ actions can be objectively categorised and consequently, treating coaching as causally derived (Jones & Wallace, 2005). Instead, social (and critical) theory is often offered as an antidote to appreciate contextual nuances. While certainly helping to promote an appreciation of complexity in coaching, an issue lies in treating context as merely a problem for aligning with a particular theory. An enduring concern, then, is the problematic treatment of context as a resource for the analysis of settings, where context is considered formally as determining action (i.e. as an extraneous source of relevance, such as types of contexts). The point being that any “constructive” analysis of coaching practice, whether it be modelled or a theoretical gloss, is in danger of glossing over, the actions of members being made visible and openly inspectable to each other and through which they collaborate in producing and coordinating their activities.

By contrast, this paper adopts an ethnomethodological indifference to context categories. In doing so, it examines the methods people are using to produce social life as producing the context (i.e. action irredeemably tied to situated practices of those producing the local order in situ). Such ethnomethodological analysis attempts to describe the “missing what” of detailed, embodied social action. It is such analysis that Button, Lynch, and Sharrock (2022) described as the “liveliest matters for persons involved in such routines” (p. xii) are discovered, i.e. the details of their collaborative work. So, the “alternative” analytic purpose of ethnomethodology adopted here is not to provide general theorisations of the phenomena under study, nor is it to “find” formal models that can be replicated, even if they are just analysts’ assumptions of the “context” of the practices are (e.g. coaching), but to uncompromisingly attend to the witnessable production and maintenance of social order by those present (i.e. members). Doing so, ethnomethodology focuses the specification and characterisation of context in, and as, the situated action of members.

For Livingston (2008, p. 841), this means “context” does not become a background resource to extract “relevant” features for analysis, but rather, as the “witnessable structuring of an activity through which and in which the identifying details of that activity are recognizable” by participants. This is a principle reflected in the wider ethnomethodological studies of sport, such as (Jenkings, 2013, Jenkings, 2017) demonstration of how rock-climbers tactfully advise each other on the local discovery of appropriate handholds or Sánchez García and Liberman’s (2021) presentation of the turn-taking practices for surfers claiming a wave. Similarly, Corsby and Jones (2019) ethnomethodologically informed analysis of how coaches “see” and accomplish observations in practice respecified observation not merely as a visual act, but as an on-going, locally organised emergent achievement. Such ethnomethodological studies illustrate how details that escape reified formal accounts of context and generalised coaching instructions can be captured.

Taking inspiration from a collection of previously unpublished manuscripts and seminars based upon the work of Harold Garfinkel, the aim of this article is to respecify coaching work, and coach observation specifically, as practice of making discoveries. To detail the artful practices of coaches’ discovery work, the analysis is concerned with “just what, in and as of only locally witnessable, technical, work-site details” (Garfinkel, 2022a, p. 22) are coaches doing when they are discovering their coaching practice? The objective, then, is to demonstrate how discovery work is central to the ongoing taken-for-granted procedures of coaching. In this way, rather than treat the context of this study as a background resource, the analysis attends to the actual practices and local production of order, collaboratively produced by members as coaching. By remaining indifferent to generics, the article is in keeping with ethnomethodology’s recurrent interest in the tendentious use of instructions, whereby individuals are interactionally involved in not only agreeing on the visible features as problematic, but actively establishing not-yet-seen features (Tuncer & Haddington, 2019).

The value of doing so is to demonstrate how coaching practice as an act of discovery is occasioned in and through the local production of grasping a performance (i.e. football; see Macbeth, 2012). The first section introduces the importance of local contingencies through a discussion of Garfinkel’s (2002, p. 95) “Shop floor problem” and proposes the relevance of “wild contingencies” within coaching as an essential feature of discovering performance. The following sections discuss Macbeth’s (2012) notes on the play of basketball, the methodological data description, analysis, and findings. The paper concludes by outlining the ways in which common understanding between individuals is foundational to produce and maintain the social order of coaching practice and that coaching practice can be respecified, not as the implementation of generic coaching doctrine, but wholly contingent upon the local practices of members to produce contextual meaning.

Discovering performance: the wild contingency of coaching

Harold Garfinkel (2002) tells us that the “shop floor problem” was one of trying to reconcile the difference between the routine, observable practical actions of the workplace members, with the sanitised “front office” version of the same activity. In turn, the “shop floor problem” demands that there is always “something more” that escapes capture in the accounts of practices found in formal guidelines, generic descriptions, and even highly detailed instruction. Here, Garfinkel (2002, p. 11) was concerned with the detailed “recurrent structures of work” and coherence in embodied practices that cannot be anticipated and defy generic descriptions. Following this line of inquiry, ethnomethodology is concerned with explicating how work-place practices are reflexively produced; that is, in the ethnomethodological sense meaning that each thing points at the other. Reflexivity in this setting therefore refers to how instructions (i.e. to correct some element of play) are reflexively tied with instructed actions (i.e. the actual movements of doing the corrected play by the athlete).¹ Each specifies and gathers meaning from the other, which Garfinkel’s (2002, p. 204) described as “the way the instruction was being made to come out, and not like that, but as that … ” produced as an interactional and observable feature of everyday life. The consequence for this study when examining how coaches, in the collaborative production of coaching as an emergent order, is to show how they are able to discover a coherence to “football” performance that is deemed coaching, and seen as such by members. However, this is not just any football performance, but a very specific local coherence that is made available to the members of the coaching practice through their engagement in it. In this regard, football performance is recalcitrant, and so, even when coaching practice is dealing with a performance as if it was a coherent practical action, what is actually required is the in-situ accomplishment of a situationally relevant and coherent account for the work at hand. One neither “objectively true” nor one “filled with doubts”, and therefore, a point of motivation for enquiry into the discovery work of coaching.

If we are to take seriously coaching as a practice of discovery, then, we must reject any docile account (i.e. generic and malleable) that loses any possible analysis of discovering the details of performance. Rather, in keeping with Garfinkel’s (2022a) discussion, the coaching practice is driving for an analysis of the wildness of the game (i.e. of the footballing performance). The concern lies with the local, witnessable, inexhaustive work-site details of coaching as discovering performance, which must be accomplished in the daily fabric of coaching practice and made visibly available by members. The seduction of formal analytic accounts of coaching practice is to abandon the in-courseness of discovering performance in favour for a generic analytical enterprise, such as those found in Cope, Cushion, Harvey, and Partington (2022). However, to do so would lose the possible wildness of the game and of coaching as it is actually done. This is not to disregard what previously might be considered the accountable contingencies of coaching practice, but to further establish their relevance in the local, shop floor of coaching practice. What is then described below is in the spirit of Garfinkel, Lynch and Livingston’s (1981) classical description of discovery work as translating unique moments, into something named and meaningful.

The research design

Inspired by some excellent previous examples (e.g. Macbeth, 2012, Evans & Reynolds, 2016, Smith, 2020), the design of the study combined audio and video recordings of football coaching practice with written first-person fieldnotes of the coach’s embodied actions. The methodological and analytical approach to fieldnotes were inspired by Macbeth’s (2012) analysis of “pick-up” basketball. Having recently been republished as an Appendix to Lynch’s (2022) edited studies of work in the science, Macbeth writes from a first-person perspective as an experienced pick-up basketball player. The purpose was to describe the orderly details of playing basketball, specifically focusing on how members produce and recognise basketball from within the game itself. Some examples in Macbeth’s (2012) analysis outlined the jointly produced details that afforded basketball its structure, regularity, reproducibility, which included the achievement of “trailers”, “teammates waiting to receive the ball”, and “moving down the court together”. In a similar vein, Sudnow’s (1978) classical study, Ways of the hand, is often praised for describing the embodied work of playing jazz as an organised and highly skilled activity. Although such work might be considered limited by examining a single-person practices, Macbeth asserted that “embedding ourselves in contextures of our own handiwork, we find the play of the game and produce its every evidence of structure in bodily crafted durations” (Macbeth, 2012, p. 207). Macbeth’s unique and elegant first-person piece described the details of basketball, not as trivial or nonsensical, but as constitutive of the “whatness” of the game itself.

Akin to Macbeth and Sudnow’s work, then, the first-person embodied account of coaching practice in this study aimed to illustrate the locally produced discovery work for coaches. Doing so shifts the traditional attention on the performer (i.e. player) to the coach, not as a detached by-stander, but a member of the practice actively trying to direct, inform, grasp, understanding, and find the unfolding play “on-the-pitch”. In this regard, the study maintains Garfinkel’s (2002) radical position on unique adequacy, which requires researchers to be “vulgarly competent” in the practices being studied. As both coach and the member providing the testimony, the ethnomethodological unique adequacy requirement of methods (Garfinkel, 2002) for this project was addressed, with the members’ knowledge (i.e. the author) informing the description and analysis of this perspicuous setting of coaching work. Following Smith’s (2022) recent description of “unique-adequacy-in-action”, the account provided is grounded in the lived details of coaching practices, with all the possible engagement, errors, and competency. Thus, my membership and participation were live and contingent matters to be described and not merely claimed.

Although Macbeth and Sudnow’s accounts both demonstrate ethnomethodological sensibility, Garfinkel (2022a, p.25) emphasised that the aim is to bring a particular order of competency under examination in a way that is demonstrative of “instructably reproducible phenomena”. In addition to the written fieldnotes, the design of the study combined audio and video recordings of the coaching practice. The audio and video recordings were generated from the regular training sessions and match-play of the semi-professional football team I was coaching. The dataset was drawn from a corpus of approximately 20-hours of audio-visual recordings of the regular training sessions and match-play of the semi-professional football team, which were accompanied by over 20-pages of written first-person fieldnotes. The size of the playing squad ranged between 16 and 30 players, along with typically three coaches (the author and two others). All the participants were over the age of 18-years and the project was granted ethical approval by the host University’s Ethics Committee. The team trained two to three times per week for approximately 90-minutes each time, with training sessions usually progressing in complexity culminating in opposed small-sided games. The video footage was generated from the recording of the training sessions using a single camera, with the audio captured via the use of a wireless microphone attached to the coach’s collar (i.e. the author). This naturally occurring data collection was non-obtrusive due to it being a common practice within the football club in that video recordings were frequently collected and used for pedagogic activities (i.e. performance analysis sessions; prompts and cues for tactical work covered in the sessions), but not publicly available. The subsequent audio and video recordings were transcribed to produce full verbatim transcriptions of the training sessions, which included, for the purpose of the analysis below, screenshots of the coaching practice.

The idea, as Smith (2020) discussed, was not to become overly committed to either fieldnotes or video recording (including screenshots), but to view video material as instructing “toward the organisational things themselves, not in order to describe the things in a more and more detailed way, but to come to see detail as organised, socially and locally, in particular ways that ‘animate’ further inquiries” (p.45). In this regard, Smith emphasised the “can be” in Macbeth’s (2012) statement that “it can be helpful to solicit the testimony of a practitioner” (p. 197). A point taken up in this study by offering both first-person accounts of the practice alongside some grainy photos of the video recordings of coaching practice in the hope of showing just how the order of talk, bodily conduct, and material objects were accomplished. The overriding purpose of this combination of data sources was to clearly illustrate the embodied, artful use of mundane practical action by members in their discovery work.

Data analysis strategy

The analytical procedure began with an “unmotivated looking”; that is, a search for orderly phenomena in the data without prespecifying what they might be, but informed by a members’ knowledge of relevance rather than a formal analytic one. From the vantage point of ethnomethodology, the footage was analysed to locate and describe how the practices of sense-making in-and-of football are locally organised as, in this instance, coaching (or coaching* as Garfinkel might designate it). For example, instances of intervention (i.e. coach-led stopping of practice or instructing within match-play) were reviewed in the data set to comprise how such moments were done. These were transcribed to be analysed as both singular instances and as a corpus for any reoccurring patterns of order. In such instances, the video footage was used to further enhance the analysis (e.g. by using freeze-frame still images connected to the transcripts). These images are screenshots of the video. They are provided in the findings to illustrate how utterances and bodily conduct in interaction were produced via the members’ methods to maintain orderliness and recognise the unfolding sequences of actions. In some instances, the screenshots have been enhanced to show the granularity of the members’ actions.²

Consequently, the analysis is aimed at finding the locally situated production of meaning; that is, the sense-making of words and actions in the on-going and emergent practices of members as part of their activities, particularly when their sense-making might be troublesome for members, thus highlighting examples of perspicuous practices. This is not to treat the account below as a form of evidence of a theoretical position, nor a critical analysis, but instead, as Garfinkel (1967, p. 38) called it, an “aid to the sluggish imagination” that aims to draw attention to the taken-for-granted and assumed, yet often overlooked, practices of coaching. These extracts are therefore examples of members’ work and understanding in the situations described, based upon a claim of vulgar competence, to understand “embodied practices whose efficacy has achieved an ordinariness and ‘equipmental transparency’ that allows no call for credentials” (Garfinkel et al., 1981, p.140). The resultant concern with the situated accomplishment of discovery work in coaching can be described under the analytic rubric of research activities known as “workplace studies” (See Garfinkel, 1986, Luff, Hindmarsh, & Heath, 2000, Lindwall, 2014).

Findings: discovering performance as coaching practice

Creating joint attention: seeing problematic feature

The nature of the task for coaches is to study the play in progress, assess the skills of those on display, and prescribe a sense of the game that might be subsequently deemed as leading to better performance. Such assessment (seeing) of football performance is motivated; not only in terms of an individual’s power, pace, guile, skills, but how individuals can be stitched together in a meaningful way in the future based upon what is visible now; that is, the relations between players. The following fieldnote provides an example:

Feet behind the white line, I study the play in progress. In this instance I stand facing the right side of the pitch; the right-sided defender (right-back) is closest to me alongside the left sided attacker for the opposition. The ball moves between bodies and bodies move around the ball; joined by the pace of the game, but separated by different trajectories as some bodies move across, behind, in-front, tussle, collide, avoid. The closest players to me are within 10 m, but play can also be the far side of the pitch some 50 m away. The spread of the players is not random, but intentionally bound by a formation; organised by me to be found by me – the coach. As the play comes closer to me, I can hear the calls, breathing, calling, and I can see the bodies moving around the ball. I also search for the movement of those away from the ball. I carefully examine the distances between players both up and down the pitch. I want the players to possess their own performance, but each must stay connected to the wider plan; our formation.

My attempt to discover this shared yet individual effort sometimes leads to being able to predict what things will come to: football, complete with order and structure. The terms I use to predict, or explain, the unfolding play are the same resources I use to address the players; “stretch the game”, “play forward”, “play quickly”. Yet, I am invaded by contingencies; some provided by our players; others by the opposition. Unaccounted for play. I am searching for something meaningful to see; I am urging myself to be analytic. To find something that will stand up as coherent when I share it. I shift from retrospective to prospective; from what has been seen and what will happen.

(Fieldnote extract)

To further illustrate this testimony in practice, the transcript below is drawn from a recording of the coaching staff’s touchline management, where the coaches are trying to get a grip on the unfolding game. We might ask, what are the relevant details that constitute direction for the players and team? In the case at hand, the coaches respond to being asked what to do by turning to each other to discuss the expected movements from the player [line 1–5], back to the game, and then back to each other once again [line 7–11]. The figures illustrate the collaborative work between coaches to make-sense-of the performance (i.e. by moving the body, hands, and feet towards each other, and away from the game momentarily). An example of how instruction was interlaced with these movements is provided below:

short-legendFigure 1.

1.Coach 1: He’s got to … The boys have just got to go a bit harder with their three [defenders], show outside, and then one of the full-backs can pop-out, the other [full-back] comes round and we leave the big switch. [Figure 1]

2.Coach 2: Yeah

3.Coach 1: Ok.

4.Coach 2: Like that.

5.Coach 1: Yeah, Mike’s positioning there has been perfect. [Figure 2]

short-legendFigure 2.

6.[2 minutes 20seconds later].

short-legendFigure 3.

short-legendFigure 4.

7.Coach 1: That’s the problem though, because Mike has done the wingback there, that means Chad has to be down. If he goes high and Jim is down, then he can get done on the switch. But, if, if … he can’t get done on the switch if Mike is doing the wing-back. [Figure 3]

8.Coach 2: Yeah. Yeah.

9.Coach 1: If Mike has done the wingback, there is no need for him not to be in a position to deal with the switch; if he is high and Jim is round and we get done on the switch then fine. But if Mike is doing the wingback, Chad can’t be done on the switch as well. [Figure 4]

10.Coach 2: Yeah, because Jim is already down.

11.Coach 1: Yeah. Both things can’t happen.

What becomes significant about creating the joint instruction is how the coaches are engaged in the discovery practices concerning what the problems are within the game. These constitute what Livingston (2008) described as the “logical properties” of giving instructions to find their way through the game. That is, they turn to one another (Figures 1–4) in a way that allows them to initiate discussion about the analysis of the game; one that is both a diagnosis and a prognosis. The coaches could have pointed out many different features – the opposition, other players, tactics, positioning, formations – but the descriptors used [lines 1–11] have the common property of trying to find agreement about the performance (see Livingston, 2008, Corsby & Jones, 2019). In this way, the diagnosis is being led by the other (line 7–11), which will culminate in a joint attention concerning what instruction is required. That is their joint discovery work.

Moreover, in the time before the description of the problematic features was initiated by the coaches, the players were “finding”, and continued to “find”, the game that they are describing. And so, the members (i.e. players and coaches) are involved in making-sense of this particular game (e.g. Coach 2 stating “like that” on line 4 in relation to the unfolding performance). In this regard, an important distinction here is that, although the descriptions are uncomplicated (e.g. “show outside” meaning to direct the player away from goal found on line 1), the description of the game and playing the game itself are two different things. In this way, the members are involved in reflexively finding the performance together, not as isolated individuals watching or playing, but collaboratively co-constructing a meaningful performance together. The adequacy of the description has two distinct properties; 1) that the player is required to realise the instruction in a way that makes their performance meaningful for the coaches (i.e. to give them something to find); and 2) that the coaches’ description works to provide some agreement that, even if the player cannot orient their actions towards those descriptions, that the description was meaningful nevertheless – it was the “right information”. This interrelationship constitutes part of the lived-work of coaching that clarifies how the context of discovering performance gains relevance.

Accelerations of established problems

The coaches’ position from the edge of the practice is partial but motivated by discovering performances that will influence the course of the play (i.e. to influence the outcomes). In this way, the expected judgement on the performance must pass as providing a coherent, comprehensible, and retrospective/prospective account of actions that have unfolded. This leads to contributing sound, noise, comments, instruction, and detail to the play as it unfolds in the form of both comments after play has unfolded (e.g. “good pass”), but also prior to the play (e.g. “move out wide”). The consequence of such detail interlocks the players moving on-the-pitch with an expectation to produce a coherent movement that corresponds with and to the detail and action. Such “detail” is often considered as in the spirit of improving performance, but also confirms that particular features of the performance have been discovered. These accelerations, or incitements to use Reynolds (2020) description, are evidence of both discovered and discovering performance. For example, in the transcript below, the comment “Good little run” on line 12 had the intention of accelerating the performance beyond what might have been produced; that is, to actively try to shape the performance by encouraging the further discovery of “good little runs”. Any accelerations, while intended for others, were indeed jointly and reflexively involved in the production of the coherent discovery of the game. The transcript below was taken from a water-break during a match, which provided a more fractured opportunity to capture the coach’s accelerations when discovering performance:

12.Coach 1: Well done, Chris. Good little run, well done.

13.Chris: Yeah. They’ve worked it …

14.Coach 1: Yeah, they’ve worked the press a little bit, its frantic.

15.Chris: You know the two 10s, you, that one where I just gave the freekick away, they both gone for the same ball. [Figure 5]

16.Coach 1: Yeah, they had both gone in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you are allowed to pop-out that’s fine. It was a good decision. It was a good foul; a good foul. It’s fine. [Figure 6]

17.Chris nods, sipping a drink.

Figure 5. Player pointing.

Figure 6. Coach responding.

Figure 7. Coach circled providing an acceleration to player.

18.Coach 1: Obviously, it would have been better to win it, but it was a good foul. It’s good though; it’s good. Just a little bit more control though, I think.

19.Chris: Yeah, it’s a bit frantic.

20.Coach 1:Yeah, and they have worked the press a bit; they have four in there, so it’s not going to be a build-up game, it’s going to be get the ball wide and then maybe sometimes come back through you.

21.Chris: Yeah, and maybe straight to Keiran.

22.Coach 1: Yeah. Maybe, but it’s good.

23.Coach 1: Well done, Tom. Well done; it’s good. [Figure 7]

24.Tom: We’ve gotta keep the ball.

25.Coach 1: Yeah, buts it’s frantic. They’ve got four in the middle don’t forget. It’s going to be; it’s always going to be tough. But that’s why we have the three up. It’s good; it’s good.

26.Coach 1: Eh, well done. [Figure 8]

27.Keiran: Yeah it’s good.

28.Coach 1: Yeah, Yeah, you’re doing well. Good bounce. Just remember, as soon as you give that bounce, penalty spot, penalty spot, penalty spot.

29.[Player 3 nods and turns.]

Figure 8. Coach providing another acceleration.

30.Coach 1: Well done Bri, make sure you are set-up on the transition.

31.Brian: Huh?

32.Coach 1: Just make sure you are set-up for the transition.

33.[Player sips water and returns to field.]

Some crucial examples among the accelerations that illustrated the discovery work are “good little run” (line 12), “pop-out” and “good foul” (line 16), “good bounce” (line 28), and “set-up for transition” (line 30 & 32). Their significance lies in re-affirming actions from the play that have been discovered and will continue to be discovered by the coaches.

Improving discovery: finding football and seeing bodies

The extracts above demonstrated how the two coaches aimed to create a joint attention when analysing the problems in the performance (i.e. discovering a meaningful performance that could be amended). Shifting to the preparation for match-play, designing and implementing training sessions involved strategically re-creating problems through various re-enactments or amendments to how the game could be played. This would involve positioning cones to shape the pitch, arrange the goals, the bibs, and the selection of each team (see Figure 9). In this sense, while training could be described as preparing the team for their next (or possible) opponents, the members were actively engaged in refining and sharing the agreed upon details of the game. What is most peculiar about this orientation is the prospective character of seeing the details of the game in-their-course. Trying to understand the movements together in a prophetic way meant to recognise what detail could be provided to improve the discovery of the performance, and therefore, influence future performance. The following fieldnote captures how the game is found as complete, ordered, and on-going, yet also continually negotiated towards an improved team performance; of what might be discovered:

I have seen these players before, so I have manoeuvred one team to be stronger than the other – I want to see the consequences. I have disrupted the alignment of some players; I want them to find their synchrony with someone else; I move our “starting” right back to central midfield. I want to increase the traffic for the player; to have more decisions, but also to understand the space created when he leaves his usual area. The different combinations should encourage different course of action, creativity, guile, and frustration. It is my job to see the players’ combining.

I watch his movement closely from the side of the practice. The uneducated on-looker may be motivated by the outcome, but I am interested in the process; in what ways things go wrong – who is where, and where are they in relation to the others. I am waiting to discover a problem I know I want to solve – the movement of the defender in possession. I am waiting to pounce; for the time to intervene.

(Fieldnote extract)

Building from the fieldnote, the members at training were actively trying to refine what was being discovered. In addition to creating the joint attention described in the first example, the serious business of discovering the performance framed any subsequent intervention (i.e. sharing what was found, or to be found). The transcript and figure below was a demonstration of; a) just how the pitch was amended to accentuate certain areas (Figure 9); and b) the interactional work the coaches engage with prior to the intervention [lines 34–41]. For example:

34.Coach 1:I’m going to bring in the … the one two here first, then I’m going to speak about the detail of that; of two things that you can do. Do what you want. Then I’ll switch them over. [coaches turn to each other in Figure 9]

35.Coach 2: Nice

36.Coach 1: Ok, happy with that?

37.Coach 2: Yep, love it.

38.[Coach 1 proceeds to intervene.]

Ok, good. Can everyone see the concept, yep? So, a bit of detail. Ok. If we are playing here, I’m the centre-mid, I’m playing play safe-side to Aiden, which you bounce it back to me. There’s two parts to it. This way we are attacking as a midfielder, so Mo is the winger or the full-back, so I want that ball to be flung in to Mo, safe side [demonstrates the pass]. That’s the first part of the pass. Hold it there. Once we get the ball wide, so from here, I want us to be a bit more inventive. Ok. So, whether you start here and work across inside; Or, you start on the inside and work it into here [points to space] as a midfielder, so you can put it around the corner to Rhyso. Ok, you can do either one. Or, you can still work the original pattern, but I want us to be more inventive. You can work in-front, you can work behind, you can work around, I don’t mind but I want us to be realistic. Ok, one two then work a pattern.

39.Coach 1: Hold it there, Ben. Hold it there [stepping into the middle of the pitch] … Stop, stop, stop. Finish it off; finish it off Chad, Mo …

40.Player 1: Does it have to be one touch?

Figure 9. Coaches circled discussing the instruction to be provided.

41.Coach 1: Does it have to be one touch? No, I just want it to be a real-life midfielder movement, not just standing there. Everyone happy? 90-second rep; let’s play.

The significance of this transcript is twofold. Firstly, as demonstrated on lines 34–37, coach 1 is gaining agreement concerning what has been discovered and is waiting to be discovered in the practice. Line 36, in this regard, clearly searches for confirmation from coach 2 concerning what will be said. From there, coach 1 proceeds to relay such information to the rest of the players. For, in line 38 and 39, a sense of what “inventive” might be glossing is provided to the players. In this way, the features of the discovery work are both confirmed, and outlined to the players before recommencing with the practice. It has both a retrospective and prospective character that is confirmed through the intervention and discussion of the practice. In this way, what is discovered through the practice shaped the instruction to the players and what might be found at a later point of discovery work.

Silence in discovery: wild contingencies

Finally, the instances of coaching have been found in the verbal directives given by coaches to the players and other coaches, but there is another complex embodied sequence that might be considered, which has been alluded to throughout. That is, it would be insufficient to reduce the work coaches do in order to discover performance as only instructions observable during coaching sessions and match-play. Restricting the analysis to only the on-field verbal interventions would be problematic, and therefore, ignoring the ways in which discovering performance is embedded, on-going, and complex. Rather, the contingencies discussed from this point on are unavoidably details located in what is at hand, just now, features of the performance being observed; of which, not all such details are immediately verbalised. In this regard, Figure 10 is offered as a recognition of the discovery work that is done in silence; that is, the two coaches (circled) can be seen moving along the side of the pitch, watching the practices intently, predominantly in silence, grasping the practice. What makes this figure as an example important beyond what has already been demonstrated is the way the coaches position themselves on the outside of the two simultaneous practices. This is not the same as creating joint attention, accelerations of established problems, or improving discovery because, while there is a naturally theoretical explanation that small-sided games espouse benefits ranging from more touches, close control, managed workload, and game realistic scenarios, silence was the preparing in a bodily way for making an evaluation of the performance. See the figure below:

Figure 10. Coaches ‘on-the-outside’ of the simultaneous practices. The coaches are circled.

Here, following Garfinkel (2022a), the local problem was what sense could be made from the (football) performance, with respect to just what is going-on; that is, the way in which the coaches have come to terms with and explain specific situations. For instance, the coach on the right can be seen leaning in the direction of the play to grasp how the bodies move. This means for the coaching practice, there are both contingencies to such a theoretical account, but also, the wild contingencies of the coach’s embodied practices that make up the theoretic account (e.g. the standing, watching, turning around, not looking, tripping over; see Garfinkel, 2022c, p. 134). In this way, foregrounding the subsequent account provided is the wildness of coaching practice; that is, the contingencies of the coaching accounts, but also, the wild contingencies not detected in those very practices – see also Evans (2017) for a detailed analysis of correcting errors in basketball. In this regard, even a description of silence, when trying to discover a performance, would not be able to sufficiently specify the details. In turn, as Macbeth (2012) exquisitely described the lived affairs of bodies-in-play, the finding of such order and structure of the game-play remained an unaccounted for feature of “being into the game” (p.62).

By way of a discussion

Taking coaching seriously is fundamental to the argument posed in this article. Macbeth’s (2012) description recognised the grace of playing as a gloss, which is a point that cannot be denied, yet finding that very grace in an intentional, meaningful, and prospective way is not merely the act of players or spectators – although some may be very adept at doing so – but a requirement of the coach. On the basis of these findings, every single time coaching occurs – from the most basic individual instruction on striking a ball to the complexities of changing formation during a phase of play as a group – coaches inescapably engage interactionally with others their professional skills and members’ knowledge to discover performance(s) in-and-as coaching. Central to this article, then, is that the discovery of such performances is both the object of coaching analysis and the outcome of coaching practices; a point the existing literature on coaching performance has explicitly and in different ways glossed. In order to reclaim coaches’ discovery work, akin to David Sudnow’s (1978, p.12) description of “gaining a sense of their location by going to them”, this article has tried to attend to some of the details of discovery practices in coaching that are seen-but-unnoticed. While I accept that the limitations of the methods adopted (first-person fieldnotes and video recording of coaching practice) are in danger of losing the phenomena via a continual reliance on treating performance as the phenomena, it is not the contents of what is deemed a (good) performance that has concerned the article, but to show how coaching in football requires those involved to take seriously the work-site details of discovering performance. Work that is, for the most part in coaching, so familiar and ordinary that coaches take-for-granted how they are actively embedded in the activity of coaching as a collaborative practice. This is not only in terms of making-sense-of the exhibited performance (i.e. discovering the performance), but also in terms of how the adequacy of the performance found permits others (i.e. players or other coaches) to orient their actions towards such an account of performance in a reflexive and ordered way.

From this perspective, coaching is not merely seen as a general activity, but rather, becomes a continual accomplishment to bind the multiple, varied, and embodied practices that are on-going and emergent. Such analysis parallels some excellent examples of coaching, such as creating joint attention found in Evans and Reynolds (2016), seeing-the-lift in Reynolds (2017), the formation of the body in Evans (2017), or seeing trouble in Smith (2020). The context of coaching, then, is accomplished through the participants socially building, organising, and contesting the way an understanding of events become distinctive and of interest to the (coaching) group. The ethnomethodological task in this article has been to show how the coaches find order in the complications of what happened and, in turn, to explicate the practices coaches use to reflexively navigate the courses of action (i.e. to discover problematic features of the activity). Following Garfinkel (2022c), the extracts are “themselves revealing of the detailed ways of practical reasoning” (p.131), and might be considered as demonstrating the methods for discovering what happened in (football) coaching. The significance of the findings lies in demonstrating how coaches, to borrow Macbeth’s (2012, p. 207) words, “live by their achievements” to produce and order the details of their practices (i.e. by creating joint attention, acceleration of established problems, and improving discovery).

Garfinkel (1967, 2002) has repeatedly shown that instructions are essentially incomplete, since they cannot account for all the embodied details required to realise them (Macbeth, 2012). It is this indeterminacy that crucially relies on participants to competently grasp the relevant features of what is going on. For, as Evans (2017) demonstrated, correcting errors in coaching required participants to reflexively orient to the context of the interactions, which allows for a mutual understanding of “what is going on, and to coordinate their actions in fine-grained ways” (p.127). In the same vein, the discovery work presented in this article is not engaged with formal descriptions of performance – for anyone could provide such a description – but how the description of the performance is achieved by members’ practices that lead to reflexively finding and orienting towards meaningful practical action. The point being made here is that the participants are learning the relationship between formal accounts (i.e. technical-tactical explanations) and the lived practices of composing and using those instructions in particular coaching settings. As reflected in Garfinkel’s (2022c, p. 135) discussion, the coaches are not engaged in discovering experiments, but “pedagogical experiments” of the local availability to our “shop floor”. Thus, rather than taking what coaches know as “instinct”, the examples in this article illustrated the work coaches are engaged in to reflexively verbalise and account for the performance of the team, which lead to instructed ways of seeing the performance. Of relevance to the present investigation was the mutual constitution of what happened and what the coaches wanted to happen. The consequence of this analysis results in a shift away from assuming that coaches are doing the discovery, but cannot make it work, towards appreciating how coaches and players not being able to make the instruction work as formally described.

More generally, the findings resonate with a diverse range of contexts that have previously illustrated the on-going negotiation between learner and instructor in the form of sequentially organised paired action; that is, where instruction is immediately followed by instructed action, which is seen as complying with the original instruction. This work of instructed vision, as illustrated through the data, is thus a perspicuous setting where coaches embodied perception, vision, and knowledge of coaching is made conspicuous – but also, perhaps more importantly, made relevant. Previous examples of instructed action include driving (Ehmer, 2021), medical settings (Mondada, 2014), and more sport specific examples, such as correcting errors in weight-lifting (Evans & Reynolds, 2016), imperative actions in boxing (Okada, 2018), and Simone and Galatolo’s (2020, 2021) analysis of climbing instructions as a pair for those visually impaired. This body of work has shown how novices rely on and refer to methodical procedures to look for and identify accepted practice – see Koschmann, LeBaron, Goodwin, and Feltovich (2011) for an example in surgery. It is this sense that is irredeemably tied to the local achievement and context through which particular actions are ordered and meaningful. The present study adds a layer of complexity to such work by illustrating the artful practices of coaches to discover (i.e. “see”, “look”, and “find”) a coherent account of what happened, or what should have happened, in the unfolding activity. Of particular interest has been the ways in which coaches’ accounts not only orient players’ actions, but how such accounts of what should happen had already undergone some preparatory work to accomplish what might then be used as instruction. Descriptions, for these coaching instances, was continually prepared* between the coaches, before sourced as instruction with the athletes. Put another way, Garfinkel (2022b) provided the analogy of preparing the latch for a key; that is, “to receive a figure that’s still not in hand” (p.124). For the coaches in this study, then, the issues raised were not only a matter of players orienting towards their instructions, but also a matter of the coaches collaboratively establishing the contents of their instruction that would advance how the players’ actioned the play.

The consequence of this article lies in demonstrating coaching practice as situationally organised in any given setting, where coaches are “in-the-game”, not merely disengaged analysts. Here, just as sporting performance is seen as rule informed not rule determined, so is the coaching attendant upon it; that is, coaching is both part of the game and emergent, not separate and imposed outside of the production practices. Through ethnomethodologically respecifying the fundamental practice of coaching as on-going emergent acts of discovery, this work adds to the growing alternative treatment of cultures – which is often assumed as producing norms, values, and rules that individuals follow (see Meyer, 2019) – as culture-in-action. By respecifying coaching practice as discovering performance, the attempt has been to show how coaches, in a simple sense, are responsible for routinely ordering the accomplishments of members (i.e. of deciding what was/is meaningful). What this ethnomethodological perspective does, then, is to demonstrate the blind spot of members’ methods of doing discovering performance. In other words, the article offers a respecification of coaching practice as an act of discovering performance; that is, the coaching practice described above is the result of the members trying to order, in an observable and reportable fashion, the wildness of the match. Doing so, the context of coaching is recast as an on-going reflexive accomplishment of those involved to establish a common understanding of what was to be discovered. This contribution is both in terms of the practices used to “see” performance (see Corsby & Jones, 2019), but also, the practical accomplishment and practical reasoning of those involved. Although what the coaches can extract from a performance is endless, the work of discovering performance is inseparable from their respective coaching context.

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.