Storying surfing coaches’ experiences of life skills development

Abstract

In the present manuscript we explore three Portuguese surfing coaches’ understandings and experiences of their roles and responsibilities concerning life skills development across youth, high-performance and master sport contexts. To achieve this aim, coaches and researchers forged a meaningful partnership over a two-year period, sharing experiences in an open and sincere manner, as well as embracing diversity of thought while rethinking life skills development across coaching contexts. Data collection was conducted through interviews (n = 12) and reflexive journalling. This partnership between researchers and coaches gave voice to coaches concerning athletes’ life skills development throughout a range of coaching contexts. These coaches, independent of the coaching context, were influenced by social and cultural forces that made them disregard life skills development and transfer. They were also pressured to value winning and performance development, and positioned the development of life skills as unrealistic coaching pursuits. An interconnected portrait of coaches’ roles and responsibilities across coaching contexts may help inform coach development and education programs that consider the diversity of sport programs being delivered in Portugal and elsewhere. Moving forward, more attention may need to be paid towards understanding how cultural, political and social variables influence coaching life skills.

Keywords:

• Pedagogy
• masters sport
• high-performance
• youth
• coach education

For the last 20 years, researchers have conveyed the importance of helping athletes develop a range of sport and psychosocial skills (Bruner et al., 2021; Holt et al., 2017; Koh & Camiré, 2015) and developed diverse ways through which coaches can teach these skills as outcomes applicable beyond the sport sphere (Bean et al., 2018; Kramers et al., 2021; Pierce et al., 2017). Life skills have been defined as skills, behaviours, attitudes and dispositions that may be utilised in sport and other life domains (Gould & Carson, 2008). They have been positioned as important for holistic athlete development and as protective factors for a range of social issues, such as establishing relationships with peers and dealing with stress and the competitiveness of today’s society (Camiré et al., 2021).

Life skills, as one of many positive youth development outcomes, have been infused into coach education programs in countries such as Brazil (Palheta et al., 2021) and Canada (Kramers et al., 2021). Qi et al. (2020), through a scientometric review, examined trends of positive youth development publications between 1995 and 2020. Findings showed how positive youth development research has increased substantially over time and is an increasingly popular topic amongst youth sport scholars. However, the mechanisms through which youth sport coaches can foster life skills have been considered complex because they are influenced by a multitude of social, cultural and political variables such as social norms and developmental needs.

Several researchers have alluded to the need of considering a range of coaching strategies to foster life skills (Bean et al., 2018; Camiré, 2022). Coaching strategies that teach life skills aim to develop athletes’ critical thinking, increased levels of awareness and contribute towards a more socially just society (Gonzalez et al., 2020). Bean et al. (2018) developed a continuum of teaching life skills implicitly to explicitly. Implicitly, coaches focus their efforts on creating an appropriate climate that can provide an environment for athletes to develop life skills through their sport endeavours (e.g. feeling physically and psychologically safe, an athlete may step as a leader on the team). Teaching life skills explicitly, coaches use deliberate strategies to foster life skills and support athletes’ understanding of how those may transfer to other life domains (e.g. discussing the ways the athlete can lead, and explaining how that may be valuable outside the sport domain).

Critically, life skills can be taught in ways that are highly normative and represent a form of (self-) surveillance that serve the purpose of indoctrinating youth to become obedient, as well as follow adults’ expectations and motivations in and outside sport (Ronkainen et al., 2021). For instance, teamwork can become a normative life skill if emphasis is placed on working together to achieve results. Conversely, teamwork can also serve the purpose of teaching youth to care for others, make efforts towards inclusion and ensure equitable opportunities for development (Camiré et al., 2021).

The bulk of research in this domain has focused on recreational and elite youth sport settings (Bruner et al., 2021; Holt et al., 2017; Newman et al., 2022). There is a lack of research on whether and how to teach life skills to athletes across the long-term development spectrum, which creates challenges for sport systems that aim to foster meaningful experiences for all sport participants (from child to adult). Mainly in North America and Australia, research in the psychology of quality sport for adults and psychosocial approaches that coaches use when coaching adults has been growing (e.g. Callary et al., 2015, Callary et al., 2021, Dionigi et al., 2018). Dionigi et al. (2018) suggested that personal assets, which contribute to personal development, could be facilitated through Masters¹ sport participation, including competence, confidence, commitment, connection (sense of community), character (leadership, sportspersonship, and contribution), cognition (learning and refining skills), and challenge. However, these assets were derived from youth frameworks (5 C’s – see Jelicic et al., 2007) Indeed, researchers have cautioned against applying frameworks to adult sport that are derived from youth experiences because they might be seen as infantilizing adult athletes’ learning through sport (Callary et al., 2017). In this same vein, coaching strategies that foster life skills development and transfer, developed through youth sport research and applied to masters athletes, may not be suitable (Santos & Callary, 2022), but research is needed to explore the ways in which coaches may develop and support the transfer of appropriate life skills in masters sport.

Within mainstream coaching cultures, life skills are often absent from general coach preparation pathways leaving coaches underprepared and underserved to teach life skills in explicit and intentional ways, as well as to go beyond normative approaches (Newman et al., 2022; Santos et al., 2023). The often prevalent ‘winning at all costs’ culture in sport creates an environment where results, performance, and sport skill development are the only concerns that need to be achieved, independently of the negative repercussions on athletes (e.g. increased risk of injury, verbal abuse, discrimination; Santos et al., 2022). Consequently, coaches lack the necessary competencies and awareness to foster life skills across the developmental spectrum. For instance, Santos and Callary (2022) found that high-performance football players in Portugal did not learn life skills from their coaches, and no explicit approaches were identified. Indeed, high-performance sport is an extremely competitive and time-consuming environment that can also generate negative experiences such as injuries, discrimination and abuse (Drew et al., 2023). However, Jørgensen et al. (2020) interviewed nine Canadian high-performance athletes to understand life skills learning. Findings revealed high-performance athletes were able to learn life skills by reflecting on their experiences and through observation. These researchers highlighted the potential of high-performance sport in inducing life skills learning.

High-performance sport and masters sport are both adult contexts where youth athletes may eventually transition and where life skills may or may not be considered worthwhile pursuits (Ronkainen et al., 2021, 2023). Nonetheless, athletes continue to learn and unlearn across sport contexts (Jørgensen et al., 2020). Studying how life skills development occurs in youth, high performance and masters sport contexts may help challenge conventional notions and conceptualizations about coach education (Woods & Davids, 2023). Thus, there is a scarcity of research and applied practice that focuses on life skills within high performance sport. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore Portuguese surfing coaches’ understandings and experiences of their roles and responsibilities concerning life skills development in three contexts that they have coached: youth, high-performance and master sport contexts.

Context

In Portugal, sport is a highly competitive environment (Camiré & Santos, 2019). There are many high performance leagues and multiple coaching requirements to formally coach in all sports (Resende et al., 2016). While not inherently negative, the competitive environment has also created an overemphasis on winning and substantial autonomy for sport organisations to operate (Carvalho, 2022). As a result, the sport system creates a platform where performance takes centerstage as the key outcome (and sometimes the sole focus) at all levels and across all sports. Funding is allocated based on sport organisations’ results and competitive level. Also, initial and continuous coach education courses are mainly focused on performance development (Santos et al., 2023). In particular, surfing may be positioned as a relatively informal action sport; however, while recreational surfing may be a ‘beach day activity,’ surf competitions in Portugal follow the same norms, rules and regulations that apply to other competitive sports (Federação Portuguesa de Surf, 2019). The highly formalised, sportised and regulated nature of the sport system in Portugal impacts all sports and athletes due to the reward system and culture at play. Thus, teaching sport skills and maximising performance are extremely valued across sport and coaching domains.

The developmental pathways of most coaches and athletes in Portugal are geared towards creating high performance athletes and achieving results. Organised recreational sport, wherein participation promotes fun, enjoyment, and leisure, is scarce. The dominant culture impacts all forms of movement (Santos et al., 2022). Once out of traditional developmental pathways that lead towards high performance, adult athletes may choose competitive masters leagues to continue their competitive performances. However, while masters sport includes a competitive element, it may also includes adults who never competed prior to this context and those that have competed at the amateur level.

Unfortunately, across the sport system in Portugal, due to the overemphasis on winning, as well as cultural and social influences, there have been increases in violence, including abuse towards referees, coaches and athletes. Other social, political and cultural factors have contributed to the creation of a highly competitive climate across the Portuguese sport landscape such as neutral sport policies, ineffective research practices and funding allocation. Ultimately, winning is attached to funding and, subsequently, winning has become the main resource to achieve social capital across sports (Camiré & Santos, 2019).

Methods

Researchers’ paradigmatic positioning and research strategy

Based on a relativist ontology and subjectivist epistemology (Denzin & Lincoln, 2017), we assume individuals’ beliefs, feelings and understandings are paramount to decode reality and cannot be separated from it. From an ontological standpoint, participants’ subjective understandings are considered central aspects to interpret and make sense of the social world. From an epistemological angle, knowledge is positioned as being socially constructed (Braun & Clarke, 2013). The authorship team includes researchers and the participants who were involved in the development of the present manuscript.

To better situate our positioning, we will describe our identities, values, beliefs, preconceptions and previous experiences. The authors all believe life skill development and transfer should be explicitly targeted in different ways in various coaching contexts. The driving force of this study were the three co-author participants (surf coaches) who wanted to reflect on life skills in the surfing context. The lead author has coached football at youth and high performance levels and is an expert in life skills development. He is also a masters athlete. The second author has coached alpine skiing at youth, high performance and masters levels, is a masters swimmer, triathlete, and skier, an avid surfer and an expert in coaching. The third, fourth and fifth authors have coached surfing at youth, high performance and masters levels, and are master surfing athletes.

Although the first and second authors do not have experience specifically in surfing, they made efforts to become knowledgeable and instigate relevant reflections in the other members of the research team. For instance, to better engage with the masters sport context, the first author joined a local sport organisation and became a masters athlete for a year. The combined experiences across the authorship team provided unique outsider and insider perspectives. This level of awareness and backgrounds created solid grounds for an in-depth analysis of the data and to convey relationships with the surfing context. In parallel, this may also result, to some extent, in utopic and highly complex perspectives towards surfing and life skill development. This was an issue the authors attempted to consider throughout the development of the manuscript by valuing applicability and feasibility while still challenging the status quo and current social norms.

The participants

The participants were three male surfing coaches who had coached within youth, high-performance and masters coaching contexts for more than 5 years. When we started this project, a purposive sampling technique was used (Sparkes & Smith, 2014) to find coaches who had (a) previously coached or were currently coaching across these three contexts (youth, high performance, and Masters), and (b) a minimum of three years of coaching experience in each context. We reached out to surfing coaches because: (a) the sport is impacted by significant social pressures to perform and achieve results; and (b) coaches in this sport typically coach a variety of coaching contexts throughout their careers (youth, high performance, and masters). All participants were currently coaching in some capacity. Since the participants are also co-authors on the manuscript, they were given pseudonyms (Porto, Gaia and Ribeira) to ensure anonymity throughout the review process and also to allow the data to speak at a group level, rather than for individual authors.

Data collection

Prior to data collection, this study was reviewed and approved by an institutional ethics committee. The first author contacted a key informant, who agreed to be a participant and helped the researchers recruit two other surfing coaches who fit the criteria. Before data collection formally began, the first author informally spoke with the three coaches and shared his desire to understand their stories, spend time understanding who they were, as well as their motivations and experiences.

Then, four interviews were scheduled with each coach (n = 12) that served as a reflexive exercise for coaches to share their approach towards life skills development within different coaching contexts and throughout time. Multiple interviews were organised per participant, with a three-week interval between interviews specifically because we wanted the coaches to take the time in each interview to talk about life skills development within one context that they have coached, without influencing how they might speak about life skills development in a different context. Thus, one interview centred around the youth context, another around the high-performance context, and a third focused on the masters context. For each participant, the order of the interviews changed to avoid a desirability effect (Bergen & Labonté, 2020). Specifically, this procedure aimed to avoid the assumption that because the coaches talked about certain life skills in the interview centred on youth sport, the same life skills would need to be discussed in the following contexts. The fourth interview allowed the participants to piece together their stories across the three previous interviews to create a fluid and interconnected story about the mechanisms and processes connected to life skills development and transfer in different coaching contexts.

Interviews started with a general question about their own athletic experience in a certain context (e.g. How would you describe your experience as an athlete in [insert context]?) and then questions centred on their coaching practice (e.g. How do you view life skills development in [insert context]?). Coaches were invited to reveal their stories (e.g. Could you please describe your experiences coaching [insert context]?). The interviewer was careful not to show judgement, avoiding the use of prompts such as ‘please justify,’ and helping the participants feel open and honest to tell their stories. These interviews were positioned as interview-conversations (Frank, 2012) in the sense they were aimed at creating a storyline and instigating reflection on past and present conceptualizations and understandings. Interviews lasted on average 75 minutes.

After each of the context interviews and before the next one, each coach was invited to write a ‘letter to their younger self’ (Szedlak et al., 2020) from when they started coaching the context that they had just been interviewed about (youth, high-performance or master’s sport) (n = 9). Szedlak et al. (2020) explain that asking coaches to look back on what they have learned in their experiences is an effective way of helping coaches to reflect on their coaching careers and appreciate aspects of their coaching that they might not have spent much time thinking about at the time. The participants were challenged to write about what they would change in the coaching strategies that they had utilised. They were invited to elaborate on the following: (a) what life skills they should focus on; (b) how they can focus on teaching those life skills; (c) what would they change and what would they need to learn. In line with previous research (e.g. Day et al., 2023), this data collection method was deemed appropriate to access the participants’ deep understandings about life skills development and portray a coherent and rich storyline. Data collection lasted for six months.

Data analysis

A reflexive thematic analysis (RTA; Braun & Clarke, 2019) was used to describe the participants’ sense-making accounts of the mechanisms that led to life skills development and transfer. The process of RTA can enable researchers to explore connections between participants’ vivid experiences and to narrate their stories as they are being built. The themes ‘are creative and interpretive stories about the data, produced at the intersection of the researcher’s theoretical assumptions, their analytic resources and skill, and the data themselves’ (Braun & Clarke, 2019, p. 6).

Therefore, several steps were taken. First, the interviews and letters were transcribed verbatim. Second, the first author read the transcripts on multiple occasions and shared his thoughts with the participants to immerse himself with the data. The first and third authors also spent many hours, both in-person and via phone, discussing the contents of the interviews, their meaning and how they could be interpreted with both the participants and with the other researcher. Third, conceptual notes were taken to identify meaningful events that helped identify each potential topics. Fourth, the transcripts and notes were translated from Portuguese into English to allow the second author (who does not speak Portuguese) to work together with the first author to engage in the analytics and write up the manuscript. These discussions were critical in moving from codes and topics towards initial themes. Once a coherent and relatable set of themes were developed and agreed upon, the researchers and the participants decided to finalise the theme development process. Three themes were developed that represented the coaches’ experiences of the integration (or lack thereof) of life skills in the contexts that they coached. Because the participants had freedom to edit the manuscript, openly share their thoughts and engage in continuous reflections, multiple versions of the current manuscript were written. These versions included distinct perspectives concerning each story and diverse types of emphases placed on certain themes. Reading over the researchers’ interpretations of the data, with time and reflection, the participants came to further realisations that were subsequently included into the manuscript. It is important to highlight that, through the principles of RTA, data analysis, writing and reflection were intertwined. Therefore, on many occasions, after the results had been written, it was necessary to read the transcripts once again and refine each narrative (i.e. enabling naturalistic generalisability and transferability alluded to by Smith & McGannon, 2018).

Through a relativist approach (Smith & McGannon, 2018), efforts to increase rigour also included the use of self-reflexivity to allow for more complex understandings and reflections to occur. This required a deep reflective effort which, for example, led the first author to join a masters team to better contextualise his reflections and share constructions about life skills. Situating contextual information and sharing with the participants were key components of this process that helped create a set of transparent, thick and representative stories. These stories did not end. The information included in this manuscript is simply the final product of how, researchers and coaches, see life skills until this point.

Results and discussion

Good intentions

The coaches’ understood that life skills are critical for youth sport programs and had intentions to use sport as an educational resource. However, these good intentions become utopic instead of actual coaching practice. The contrasting nature of this theme highlights how results and performance eventually take over in the youth sport context. Life skills development progressively became a commodity that coaches could not afford.

Coaches stressed how explicitly teaching life skills is key within youth sport contexts and more important than attaining other types of outcomes such as results. In other words, time occupied developing life skills was time well spent. Gaia alluded to this notion in one of his interviews:

My focus is on attitudes and life skills. We know perfectly that we have two or three athletes that will make it to high-performance sport. And if the others do not make it? We need to take advantage of sport to shape their character. This is why in our surfing club we focus on skills such as respect, sharing waves… Sharing waves, in the future [and out of sport] represents sharing a project at work where we need to respect others.

Surfing was characterised as a plateau of good intentions where coaches engaged in explicit strategies to life skills development (i.e. discussing and practicing life skills; Bean et al., 2018).

Nonetheless, over time, this balanced view about athlete development that considered the need of developing both sport and life skills was disregarded. While wanting to embody Good Intentions, the coaches recognised the presence of another objective in youth sport: winning. This objective was influenced by the performance-guided culture prevalent in the Portuguese sport system. Hidden amongst intentions to explicitly foster life skills was an implicit agenda derived by utilitarian interest – teach life skills that athletes need to learn in order for them to perform and win in surfing. Life skills were envisioned as a means to an end and positioned in a normative way. For instance, teaching the life skill of perseverance was seen as a worthwhile pursuit across youth sport settings because it was needed for athletes to succeed in surfing. Coaches conveyed the notion that perseverance can help athletes work through the pain and endure the challenges posed by performance contexts later in their developmental path. Gaia’s reflections on teaching perseverance in youth sport outlined how this life skill was actually important for performance purposes. He started ‘I do not care if I have a champion at 12 years old.’ While this attitude by the coach seemingly disempowers the culture of winning in youth sport, Gaia followed up with: ‘I care if he can be a champion at 12, 18 and 20 years old! Now, to have a champion at 12 that quits the sport because he [lacks perseverance] does not matter to me.’

Conversely, perseverance was not positioned as a skill needed to accept challenges outside sport (e.g. to improve grades at school or try a different activity that the youth has never done before) or thrive for a more just and inclusive environment (e.g. continue to voice an opinion about the need include all people in physical education and sport). These ideas about the ways that life skills can transfer out of sport were absent from the coaches’ thoughts – they did not provide any strategies aimed at discussing and practicing transfer (Bean et al., 2018).

The change in the coaches’ perspective was motivated by the cultural and social forces at play within the Portuguese sport system (Santos et al., 2023). The coaches prioritised pragmatism over changing the status quo. By accepting they could not fight the (over-competitive) system or have the luxury of achieving moral victories, the coaches noted that they allocated the responsibility of fostering life skills to the athletes’ parents. Ribeira also reported:

There is a sensitive issue here…I am not my athletes’ father or mother and I do not want to be. To introduce values and life skills is a sensitive issue as parents may not agree and may not want us [coaches] to do so. They might even say ‘we are the ones that should educate them.’ I mean, programming is still traditional. It is still explicitly centered on the sport, not on life skills.

Thus, the coaches were pressured to focus on performance development and winning. It should be noted that the coaches could face being fired or losing social capital if they failed to achieve these objectives: ‘I think people are more concerned about results. They want to know about annual and weekly planning, and if an athlete reaches a certain performance level, and that is it.’ (Porto).

The coaches’ rationale for abdicating efforts to discuss and create opportunities to practice life skills have been acknowledged in previous research (Camiré & Santos, 2019). Within Portuguese youth sport, established and deeply instilled norms and routines do not support the good intentions mentioned at the start. Thus, life skills were just good intentions and, at the same time, commodities that, due to the overemphasis placed on winning, coaches could not afford, which reflects a counterintuitive but realistic storyline (Bruner et al., 2021; Coakley, 2016). Youth sport systems absorbed the good intentions of coaches to teach life skills that required coaches to do what the sport culture required them to do. Such perspective placed life skills at the periphery of coaches’ roles and responsibilities. Instead, youth sport promised life skills development but delivered performance skills.

Do or die

The coaches talked about life skills but only as outcomes needed for athletes to survive in high-performance sport (not as process objectives). In this context, helping athletes apply skills across other life domains beyond sport was not a relevant objective. The performance and winning at all costs culture remained undisrupted.

Porto alluded to the narrow and normative way that life skills were positioned for athletes to function and thrive in high performance:

When this athlete got an injury [year removed to ensure anonymity], they told him he would never surf again. In the next year, he won everything on national and international levels. He had mastered perseverance. In the past, in youth sport, I was working on this life skill with him without even knowing.

Perseverance was operationalised as an outcome for a viable present and future. No processes for the development of this life skill, either implicit or explicit, were directly identified. The coaches relied on a problem-based approach, whereby they tested athletes to assess if they were going to make it in high-performance sport.

In contrast to Good Intentions in youth sport, Do or Die identifies how athletes must, at this point in their athletic careers, show mastery of life skills and use them to deal with internal and external pressures to perform. If they are not able to meet the demands of the high-performance sport, there is no place for them. Ribeira echoed these sentiments:

Above all, you [as an athlete] need to understand this is a sport with multiple external factors such as the conditions of the sea, wind, the tides, among others … You also need to have a great ability to adapt … and have values and skills you need for the sport. To be an athlete you need to follow rules, be disciplined…

Having these life skills (e.g. adaptability, discipline) was seen as a direct consequence of being part of high-performance sport. Studies (e.g. Chinkov & Holt, 2016; Jørgensen et al., 2020) have noted that sport can induce life skills learning through implicit strategies such as the creation of a positive climate. However, even the implementation of implicit strategies requires coaches to be deliberate and carefully reflect on their coaching practice (see Gould & Carson, 2008 concerning direct and indirect teaching) which was not the case in the present study. Unfortunately, the coaches did not mention any explicit strategies to foster life skills or their transfer to other settings (e.g. work or school): ‘I have no doubt that sport helps life skills transfer because athletes need to be strong in sport…’ (Gaia). Bean et al. (2018) implicit-explicit continuum may help coaches become aware of different strategies towards life skills development which, subsequently, can help them recruit implicit-explicit strategies according to context. The multitude of existent implicit-explicit strategies (Newman et al., 2022) can then serve as the basis for coaches to develop a situated coaching approach towards life skills.

The immense pressure placed on athletes and coaches in the high-performance system resulted in coaches using a fictitious but well-believed sport myth (Ronkainen et al., 2023) that developing life skills and having these transfer out of sport was a natural and direct consequence of sport participation:

The high-performance coach must be motivated to say ‘No! I want this badly and I will win it all!’ … I think that if athletes see sport and life as one and the same thing, they will take much more from sport and achieve this transfer. (Ribeira).

Previous studies have noted that high-performance sport reflects a subculture where coaches and athletes are pressured to win (Richard et al., 2023). In this study, coaches devoted time to this pressure too, and believed that being in sport allowed athletes to develop life skills that would naturally transfer outside of sport, without needing to devote time and space to teach these to athletes. As a result, life skills transfer was a hope. The absence of space and time to develop life skills refers to the social support needed from the other elements of the sport system that should endorse such a mandate (Pierce et al., 2017). With no recognition of the value of life skill development within high-performance sport, coaches also needed to survive, maintain an ethical conduct, and focus on doing what the high-performance system required of them.

The last chance

The coaches attempted to infuse life skills in masters sport. These intentions were met with both acceptance and disapproval from athletes. This theme therefore shares an intricate portrait of the tensions between life skills and performance objectives. Such tension within masters sport also makes sense: Masters sport groups have been described as very heterogeneous, whereby within the same group, the coach works with athletes with varied abilities, skills, experiences, motives, and interests (Callary et al., 2015).

The coaches highlighted specific life skills that may be useful to adults facing traumatic life events common to older age, such as the death of a loved one, being fired, or going through a divorce. Specifically, life skills such as coping and stress management could apply to the developmental needs of masters athletes. Indeed, assuming that people engage in masters sport simply for physical activity, without emotional, social, personal and psychological impact, is problematic. Callary et al. (2021) have suggested several social, emotional, and cognitive hallmarks for quality masters sport experiences. Gaia reported the following in his interview:

Today we feel bad because something happened, such as being out of a job or a divorce. The sea provides us with hard times as well. Training with 10/12 degrees Celsius in the cold is a factor that will help develop our ability to cope in other life situations and think ‘Be calm. I can cope with that.’

However, the coaches claimed that over time they realised that their masters athletes tended to leave the program when they infused an explicit life skill focus (i.e. discussing and practicing transfer; Bean et al., 2018) into surfing as the adults found it infantilizing that the coaches might perceive that they do not have the skills needed to succeed in life. This has been suggested by Santos and Callary (2022), who noted that adults do not want to be treated as children in sport. As a result, the coaches no longer tried to foster life skills with their masters athletes.

Instead, they thought they needed to have programs that were focused on competition because they felt that masters athletes were motivated to win. On one hand, coaches noted that many athletes’ previous experiences within high performance environments impacted their conceptualisation of what sport in general should entail – winning – like in Do or Die. Porto said, ‘When we started these interviews, I realized why I lost masters athletes. I went from 30 to the 10–12 that I have now. Why [did I lose these athletes]?’ Porto explained that he felt that he needed to structure practices competitively to appease the masters athletes’ attitudes towards sport participation. On the other hand, those who wanted a sport experience that was not so competitively-oriented seemed to be ‘destroyed’ by the others’ focus on competition and would leave the group. Porto continued: ‘They have an ego and quickly turn objectives into an unhealthy competition. This unhealthy competition destroyed the group.’ The coaches felt hand-cuffed: they thought an explicit focus on life skills was unwanted, but they also lost masters athletes who may have liked the life skills focus. Masters athletes are known to have a ‘pay for play’ attitude, whereby they will not continue to pay for something that does not meet their needs. They will leave the program if it does not cater to their motives and interests (Rathwell et al., 2015).

Ribeira also tried to explicitly develop life skills with his masters athletes, but hesitated because athletes were not open to learn life skills. However, now, he regrets making this decision. In his letter to his younger self, he wrote: ‘Since the first day, you should have discussed emotional control with every athlete … also perseverance and resilience.’ In his interview, Ribeiro attempted to justify why athletes were not open to learn life skills: ‘[I feel that] many masters athletes are people who do not like what they do and are probably frustrated with their professional and personal life. They may take my approach towards life skills development the wrong way.’ This opinion is counter to the research on Masters athletes, which indicates that most of these athletes are highly educated and have high-powered careers (Callary et al., 2017).

For athletes who did not come from a high-performance background, Gaia said competition was especially difficult to use in a positive manner:

Many masters athletes did not have any type of sport experience. Not only in this sport but in any sport. It is amazing that we have people at 40 years of age that never participated in a competitive sport event. Nothing! This helps explain why they experience competition very intensely now.

This quote is also at odds with the research that indicates that many (if not most) masters athletes have been involved in sport to some degree previously in their lives (Larson et al., 2021). More research into the Portuguese context is needed to better understand these cultural differences in masters sport. Nonetheless, Ribeira discussed different degrees of sport participation, all of which, according to him, promoted poor competitive skills:

In masters sport, competition can bring the worst out of everyone … because many athletes are frustrated for never winning anything; others left the sport and never took it seriously; and others left the sport early and decided to come back later in life.

Within the Portuguese sport system, winning has been positioned as the main priority (Santos et al., 2022). Therefore, athletes who have failed to win or who have had unsuccessful careers in sport may see masters sport as the last opportunity to (try to) win. Such mindset may create a negative sport environment fuelled by the need to win at all costs. In general, the coaches thought that masters athletes positioned sport as an outlet for their frustration and the last attempt to engage in a competitive event. This was the main reason why they felt they needed to cater to competition and there was no time to waste on coaching life skills, which was seen as infantilizing anyways.

The focus on competition is in sharp contrast to masters sport in other parts of the world, where coached masters athletes have been profiled as having social motives, motives for improvement, and also wanting to control or lead (Rathwell et al., 2015). Further, masters swimmers have been grouped into three profiles as either low-competitive specializers, high-competitive specializers, or samplers, with each profile not significantly associated with demographic variables (Larson et al., 2021). Finally, Young et al. (2021) have suggested several hallmarks associated with quality masters sport, including outcomes associated with competition, such as mastery and validation, but also other outcomes not associated with competition, such as fun and fitness, quality relationships, and intellectual stimulation.

While explicit life skills development may have been infantilizing, and no life skills focus ‘destroyed’ participation, there was potential to use masters sport as a platform to implicitly work on unconventional life skills. This quest was still alive in the participants’ perspectives. Porto’s letter to his younger self contributed to an understanding about how new pathways, where life skills are developed in and through masters sport, are still possible:

Porto, to himself as a young masters coach:

Before anything, I need to warn you. Get ready for this adventure because it is not as easy as coaching young athletes. You should have coached life skills from the start. They could have helped you manage the group and avoided losing some athletes along the way. I know that now it is easy to speak about this topic because I have some knowledge that you do not have. But why did you not have that knowledge? It is easy to answer – you are comfortable with a strategy that works within youth sport. However, masters athletes know what they want, and they are so much more demanding. When they do not see immediate results, they go somewhere else.

An implicit approach to coaching life skills seemed to become more acceptable and culturally valid in masters sport. Implicit strategies do not need to come at the cost of explicit ones. Based on the continuum proposed by Bean et al. (2018) coaches may start with implicit strategies and, if possible, move towards explicit ones.

Overall, within the Portuguese sport system, masters sport is often neglected and disregarded. For instance, in 2020, there were 69,683 masters athletes in the Portuguese sport system (PORDATA, 2020). However, we were not able to find any guidelines, coach education courses or forums centred on this coaching context, as well as no research studies conducted within the Portuguese masters sport landscape. The trials and tribulations inherent to masters sport deserve careful consideration moving forward and further introspection.

Conclusions

In the present manuscript we explored three Portuguese surfing coaches’ understandings and experiences of their roles and responsibilities concerning life skills development in youth, high-performance and master sport contexts. These coaches, independent of the coaching context, were influenced by social and cultural forces that made them disregard life skills development and transfer. They were also pressured to value winning and performance development, and positioned the development of life skills as unrealistic coaching pursuits. However, there were multiple ways through which coaches were guided to disregard life skills development and transfer, as well as use athletes as means to an end – winning – which requires further introspection. There is the need to move towards new ways of conceptualising sport in Portugal, through research and practice, as a positive context for life-long development.

As part of these efforts to rethink sport, future studies may provide unique insights about coaches’ stories across other socio-cultural contexts, and help evaluate the impacts of coach education programs and policy guidelines, including a greater focus on masters sport. To use sport as an inclusive and transformational tool across the developmental spectrum requires more effort towards discussing current challenges. This study indicates that new possibilities and innovation in the Portuguese sport system is needed in order for coaches in all contexts to have the latitude to foster life skills.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Masters sport is typically organized for adults aged 35+ (although this varies by sport). Masters athletes follow regular training and register for Masters-level events and competitions.