‘Being’ in the coaching world: new insights on youth performance coaching from an interpretative phenomenological approach

Abstract

Since Heidegger's influential text; Being and Time (1927/2005), the phenomenological question of what it means to 'be' has generated a vast body of work. This paper reports data from a phenomenological study that investigated what it means to 'be' a youth performance coach. An overview of the interpretive phenomenological methods used (Van Manen, 1990) is followed by presentation of coaches and data. Data analysis resulted in the identification of three constituent 'essences' of youth performance coaching: (i) care; (ii) a commitment to educate athletes authentically for corporeal challenges to come; and (iii) working with others to achieve a specialised corporeal excellence. The three identified essences manifest themselves in a broad lifeworld that includes settings on and off the field of play. Given the very different insights into the practice of coaching that emerge from this study, we argue it would be useful for future studies of coaching practice and coach education to extend their focus to take into account coaches' wider lives both on and off the field of play. We also argue for further exploration of coaching by drawing on phenomenological concepts such as care and relationality.

Youth sport coaches’ role in facilitating positive youth development in Portuguese field hockey

“…For example, the Portuguese Hockey Federation (2015) has just created a learning module entitled "Positive Youth Development" as a pilot training programme within their project "Positive Youth Development in the Coach Education Process of Youth Coaches". As discussed by Cronin and Armour (2015), such approaches to coach education can help restructure the discourse of elite youth sport more towards "youth performance coaching as a caring act, which aspires to educate young people through a commitment to the development of corporeal excellence" (p.11). Such efforts represent necessary and timely steps to address the organisational resistance that exists in embracing PYD in competitive youth sport (Coakley, 2016).…”

Psychophenomenology and the explicitation interview for accessing subjective lived experience in sport coaching

“…Typically, interpretative phenomenological studies identify the primordial constituents of the phenomenon itself, rather than a single, episodic, or causal account of it. In the context of sport coaching, phenomenological studies have provided rich descriptions about the experiences of 'being', for example, by describing the lifeworld of a youth performance coach (Cronin & Armour, 2017); and through the exploration of 'doing', to understand the practical knowledge of participants in specific settings (e.g. free skiers, Nyberg, 2015).…”

Significance of Coaching in the Context of Emotion Regulation

“…Further exploration of coaching could be enriched by drawing on phenomenological concepts of care and relationship (Cronin -Armour 2017).…”