Sport coaching can be seen as an interdisciplinary endeavour, where coaches integrate multiple disciplinary knowledges to support participants achieving a variety of desirable outcomes (e.g. learn new skills, meet new people, develop greater confidence). Limited research however has considered "what" knowledge has been used as the basis…

Research shows that athletes across levels and sports have been subjected to maltreatment with non-sexualised forms such as psychological abuse and neglect found to be the most common. With the normalisation of many of these forms of abuse occurring in sports, researchers have called for the 'safeguarding' of athletes to focus on prevention…

The impacts of professional sporting culture and institutional discourse on coaching practices and ideologies have largely been unconsidered and undiscussed. Understanding coaching practice from a social perspective can provide insights into the prevailing culture that coaches are immersed within, pointing to patterns of discourse, norms and…

This article focuses on the influence of early life experiences and socio-cultural context on coach learning in the sport of rugby league. It draws on the findings of a study that investigated the influence of cultural context on the development of elite-level rugby league coaches in England and Australia. The article focuses on the influence of…

The micro-level enactment of elite sport policy has received little critical coverage in the sociology of sport subdiscipline. This paper provides original insights into how coaches working in professional youth football academies variously interpreted, experienced and engaged with The FA Premier League's Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP).…

By examining on-course pedagogical practices, recent research has sought to inform the development of National Governing Body (NGB) coach education courses. Coach education programmes are, however, social constructs, and are influenced by policies and socio-economic factors. To inform future provision, there is a need to understand the…

There has been a growing trend of elite athletes being fast-tracked into post-athletic high-performance coaching roles in association football and rugby union in England and Wales. This has been facilitated by an increase in bespoke and condensed formal coach education courses that are designed to accelerate current and/or former elite athletes in…

Problem-based learning along with other game and player-centred approaches have been promoted as valuable alternatives to more traditional, skill-based, directive, and leader-centric pedagogical approaches. However, as research has shown, they are not unproblematic or straightforward to apply. Heeding to calls for more empirical studies of…

This paper addressed the lived experiences of two community sports coaches in an era of neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, and insecure employment. Specifically, we considered (a) their attempts to develop a desired occupational identity in a casualised and audit-driven industry and (b) their experiences of the tensions that existed between the…

Formal coach education has been described as an activity which promotes conformity from course attendees. To date, however, few studies have looked at how coach education has been socially constructed over time. The present study addresses this gap and provides a Freirean account of English Football Association (FA) coach education since 1967.…

Physical education (PE) in England, has historically been and is increasingly seen as a subject in which political agendas can and are being enacted (Penney, [2008]. Playing a political game and playing for position: Policy and curriculum development in health and PE. "European Physical Education Review" 4(1): 33-49) as health, sport and…

In this paper, I explore male youth sport coaches' use of humour in relation to the reconstruction of masculinities, contributing to an emergent body of literature on the role of humour in coaching. Three creative non-fiction stories developed from my own coaching experiences in a competitive youth football (soccer) academy are used to examine:…

Collaborative action learning was undertaken in response to the growing criticisms of formal coach education. Since it is strongly felt that we can no longer merely commentate on what is not happening in terms of coach learning, a key requirement now is to demonstrate there are other options. The Coach Learning and Development (CLAD) programme was…

Primary physical education (PE) lessons tend to be taught by one, or a combination of, three different groups: generalist classroom teachers, specialist primary PE teachers and so-called adults other than teachers, who are almost exclusively sports coaches. Drawing upon data gathered from one-to-one interviews with 36 subject leaders (SLs), this…

At the beginning of the 2013/2014 season in England and Wales, 90 head coaches of the 92 men's national professional football league clubs and 20 of the 22 men's professional rugby union clubs had tenure as a professional elite player in their respective sports. Moreover, Rynne [(2014). "'Fast track' and 'traditional path' coaches:…