Your reading for this module outlines 6 characteristics of the coaching process and an associated, yet itinerant, research issue. Even though you are

One of the primary reasons for initiating a second edition of the book was the significant expansion of academic writing since the publication of the first edition in 2002. As we will demonstrate, the academic study of sport coaching has increased in depth, breadth and quality. This is evident in the number of academic departments and staff in universities, the range of disciplinary lenses being applied to the subject and the number of dissemination avenues open to the researcher. The number of postgraduate programmes, PhD completions and peer-reviewed publications is testament to a rapidly evolving field of study. It is important, therefore, to begin by charting some of the developments that have taken place. We do this, not only to provide context, but because we believe that an adequate interpretation of the field of coaching science requires a measure of conceptual appreciation. Our belief is that the diversity of academic enquiry is in danger of creating a rather fragmented and polemical field of study, without an understanding of the conceptual framework that could bind it together. The aim of the second edition is to provide just such a conceptual framework.

The purpose of this short introductory chapter is to provide an overview of the principal developments in academic ‘thinking’ about sport coaching in the past 15 years. Clearly, the scope for a descriptive account of each ‘school’ or disciplinary approach is endless. This is not our intention, however. Some selective readings are offered, but readers can easily follow-up each of these approaches in detail. Rather, our purpose is to identify the major schools of thought as they apply to sport coaching and to offer a critical interpretation of their ‘positioning’ in relation to the conceptual framework. Therefore, the issues that will be raised relate to definitions, boundaries, domains, modelling, key questions, place of performance objectives and the role of the coach. We hope to demonstrate that attention to a consensual conceptual framework would allow better communication, a reconciliation of positions and a unifying mechanism for aggregating academic contributions to education and development.

We take the view that the distinctive disciplinary positions, with their concomitant methodological paradigms, are not inimical but take different perspectives and merely address different questions – a question of focus and scope rather than validity. Nevertheless, we are also aware that academic writing in our field is often unnecessarily adversarial in nature; perhaps more concerned to identify the shortcomings of other perspectives rather than highlighting the strengths of their own. We invite you to consider whether the practical implications for change and evolution in coaching practice are as evident as the identification of limitations in existing practice. The developments in academic writing and theoretical scaffolding have taken place alongside much enhanced coaching provision in schools, high-performance development programmes, talent development pathways and coach education programmes. Nevertheless, our own experience as coach developers suggests to us that earlier warnings that there is a theory–practice divide have not yet been overcome. It is our hope that greater attention to the conceptual framework for sport coaching will facilitate greater communication between academics and developers.

Rather than be overwhelmed by the mass of published work on sport coaching, we have adopted a more pragmatic approach of identifying the key categories and offering a critical interpretation of their relationship to some of the conceptual framework constructs that were introduced in the first edition and elaborated in this. In one sense, we are attempting to raise the profile of these concepts, which we will then deal with at much greater length in subsequent chapters. Useful theoretical and philosophical categories are identified by Gilbert and Trudel (2004), Gilbert and Rangeon (2011) and North (2013). One option available to us was to group writings under thematic headings, and we would commend this to you as a useful exercise – such themes as expertise, planning, goal-setting, pedagogy, career development/socialisation and effectiveness. We have selected a balance of thematic and discipline-based approaches and have categorised recent academic approaches in the following way: behavioural, cognitive, complexity, social and conceptual (a much fuller account of theoretical approaches is provided in Chapter 9).

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE LITERATURE

Behavioural approaches

Many of the references cited in the first edition were based on behavioural research. In general, such an approach looks for regularities in coaches’ behaviours through observation instruments that identify observable behaviours. These are quantified and categorised according to constructs such as praise, negative feedback, questioning, instruction and so on. Such an approach can be criticised as being positivistic and insufficiently sensitive to contextual variation. In addition, the search for ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ behaviours that lead to effective coaching may be criticised as perpetuating a ‘one way’ approach to coaching and coach education.

INTERPRETATION

■Behaviours are correlated with personal characteristics or ‘effectiveness’ criteria (satisfaction, enjoyment, self-esteem) and rarely, if ever, with performance-related outcomes, athlete objectives or practice contexts.

■The use of observation instruments has been easier to conduct in controlled situations, i.e. coaching sessions and to a lesser extent competition, and this has focused attention on intervention behaviour. This ‘episodic’ emphasis may account for the association with instructional behaviour.

■The language of coaching domains would provide context to such studies – the role of the coach, practice behaviours and judgements of ‘what, when and why’ need to be situated in an appreciation of domain regularities.

■Expertise is couched in terms of the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’ of intervention behaviour, although mixed methods work has begun to address this issue.

This approach continues to be used with more technologically advanced instrumentation (Cushion et al. 2012) and an attempt to provide more contextual background (Horn 2008) or reinforcement from coach interviews. There has also been some attempt to model appropriate behaviours (Jowett 2007) and a considerable literature on coaching efficacy (Feltz et al. 2008).

It seems clear that attention to the conceptual framework in terms of expertise, effectiveness, role of the coach and coaching domains (which would include process boundaries) would enhance interpretation of this type of research. Criticisms are largely based on the methodological paradigm adopted, but it is important not to criticise this approach beyond what it claims to achieve. In our view, the search for regularities in behaviour continues to be useful, but a more nuanced contextual siting is required, particularly if related to performance outcomes.

Cognitive approaches

The first edition of the book paid particular attention to decision making as an important feature of coaches’ behaviour and practice, building on some earlier work (Lyle 1992, 1996, 1999; Côté et al. 1995), and introduced Naturalistic Decision Making as an appropriate paradigm to explain coaches’ decision making. Since publication in 2002, the cognitive approach to conceiving of and understanding sport coaching has become a major school of thought in this field. We conceive of coaching expertise and operational coaching as a cognitive exercise. This means that there is a need to identify, understand and develop the cognitive structures, organisation and processes that facilitate the coach’s behaviour. This is evidenced in the work of Abraham and Collins (2011a, 2011b), Lyle (2003, 2010), Vergeer and Lyle (2007, 2009), Debanne (Debanne & Fontayne 2009; Debanne et al. 2014), Nash and Collins (2006) and Harvey et al. (2015).

Interest in sport coaching has grown significantly in the new millennium in line with coaching being perceived as a legitimate profession around the world, and an emerging field of academic study. These factors have resulted in an increase in the volume and scope of scholarly activity related to it (Rangeon et al. 2012; Lyle & Cushion 2010). In a recent review and citation network analysis of coaching research that included 3,891 references, Rangeon et al. (2012) found that:

■some of the most prominent sport coaching research articles have been traced back to the early 1970s;

■the yearly publication rate of coaching related research has increased dramatically;

■there are over 1,000 research studies on sport coaching published in peer-reviewed English-language journals;

■forty-one publications were identified as ‘key publications’ – the top three being a book (Sports Coaching Concepts: A Framework for Coaches’ Behaviour (Lyle 2002)) and two research papers (Cushion et al.’s (2003) article on coach education; and the ‘coaching model’, published by Côté et al. (1995));

■numerous overviews of the ‘coaching science’ literature are now available (e.g. Côté & Gilbert 2009; Gilbert & Trudel 2004; Horn 2008; Lyle & Cushion 2010); and

■“coaching science is highly influenced by a small set of key publications and researchers” (p. 103).

From this work, and as we have previously suggested (see Lyle & Cushion 2010; Cushion & Lyle 2010), there is now a considerable landscape of coaching research with a bewildering range of theoretical and empirical perspectives and insights into coaching. Despite this apparent depth of empirical work, we remain surprised that there is still a lack of in-depth understanding of coaching and a clear conceptual underpinning with which to inform coaching practice and coach education. Despite our research efforts, and a degree of ‘clustering’ of ideas around, for example, ‘coach effectiveness’ and ‘decision making’, these remain contested notions, leaving us with little consensus or clarity about the nature of coaching.

Cited in our earlier review of the ‘state of the field’ (Lyle & Cushion 2010), but still useful, is Ward and Barrett’s (2002) test of the utility and value of research to a practice community, which asks the extent to which its findings are (a) used as recommended practices in the preparation of practitioners; and (b) incorporated by practitioners in everyday practice. There are positive research examples to be found of interventions in coach education and coaching practice – but no evidence for the systematic application of these, or any other findings, in the development of coaching practice or coach education in terms of either methodology or results. As a result, the increased research attention devoted to coaching, with its considerable weight of research studies and the level of conceptual and theoretical development in coaching, has had little apparent impact on coaching practice or coach education and a somewhat disheartening picture of the ‘effectiveness’ of coaching research to impact practice can be drawn – we have yet to distinguish between our knowledge of how coaches operate and our capacity to describe this, or indeed how we educate and develop coaches.

KEY CONCEPT

There is a lack of in-depth understanding of coaching and a clear conceptual underpinning with which to inform coaching practice and coach education.

There are positive research examples to be found of interventions in coach education and coaching practice – but no evidence for the systematic application of these, or any other findings, in the development of coaching practice or coach education in terms of either methodology or results.

The purpose of this chapter is to give some consideration to why research is a low-impact endeavour when it comes to influencing coach education and coaching practice. It is not to conduct a ‘review of literature’ as such, but to provide some insight to, and suggest possible reasons for, the current impotence of coaching research in generating impact on practice. The chapter then goes on to develop a research agenda for coaching and considers the research process pertaining to coaching, the nature of the coaching process and assertions about coaching from which to demonstrate the generation of research questions.

AN OVERVIEW OF EXISTING RESEARCH

Coaching research has its own history and character. The early systematic observation studies (e.g. Lacy & Darst 1985) and leadership model (Chelladurai & Saleh 1980) were influential in the devising of coaching behaviour frameworks. It is not surprising, therefore, that Gilbert and Trudel’s (2004) review identified that ‘coaches’ behaviours’ were the main research interest from 1970 to 2001. These gave way to the interview and observation approaches of, for example, Salmela (1995), Gould et al. (1990), Gilbert (Gilbert & Trudel 2004) and Côté (Côté et al. 1995). In the last 10–15 years, the acknowledgement of a coaching process has spawned a search for the most appropriate means to represent and understand it (see Lyle 2002 and review by Cushion et al. 2006). While Rangeon et al.’s (2012) review showed this focus had shifted to research considering ‘coach development’, with 25 per cent of the most cited publications in their analysis directly dealing with this topic (a focus on coach education, learning and related developmental issues for coaches). They suggest that this shift is due to a growing field moving beyond description to understanding in terms of coach development and learning.

However, Cushion et al. (2010), in their review, point out that this area of coaching research suffers from a number of issues:

■being of mixed quality;

■often lacking a developed theoretical position;

■approaches coaching with implicit assumptions;

■research is from educational contexts with students, rather than with coaches;

■research is often cross-sectional perception/satisfaction studies;

■the research rarely sets a conceptual boundary for coaching or the domain under study;

■the findings are stretched in some way to fit all coaching domains, or are highly context-specific;

■meaningful research is often precisely that, namely highly context-specific; and

■it is difficult to find longitudinal, empirical evaluation.

While taken specifically from the coach learning and development research, we would contend that these issues would apply when considering the wider coaching research field. Importantly, as we have suggested previously (Lyle & Cushion 2010; Cushion & Lyle 2010), coaching research itself may be a misnomer, and we may be guilty of perpetuating here the concept of a unified field or consensual purpose that we argue does not exist currently. Without wishing to offer a taxonomy of research, we can point to the following areas of research interest, in addition to coach education and development:

■coaching practice, both environment and career;

■coaches’ behaviours, both intervention/delivery and interpersonal;

■coaches’ cognitions, both decision policies and decision making; and

■coaches’ expertise.

Rangeon et al. (2012) also identified the following research areas as ‘hotbeds’ of publication and citation – in order of ‘importance’ in their analysis: