Breaking Coaching’s Rules: Transforming the Body, Sport, and Performance

Abstract

“Who knew that doing the wrong things could make everything so right?” There can be little doubt that sports’ dominant bioscientific articulation of the athletic body exerts a strong influence on coaches. Yet, on closer examination, this articulation and the practices it produces are not as straightforward as most coaches and scholars assume. Within the sociocultural study of coaching, scholars have drawn on Michel Foucault’s disciplinary framework to analyze many unseen problems and unintended consequences associated with coaches’ normal or everyday (bioscientific) practices. However, one significant aspect of Foucault’s theoretical framework that has received less attention from coaching scholars is how power and discourse work together to produce several coaching “truths.” To address this gap, in this article, we analyze the first author’s experiences as an international middle-distance runner by showing and telling what problems and constraints are produced when coaches, and by association their athletes, defer to a dominant bioscientific articulation of the athletic body in their training. We conclude by discussing the transformative possibilities when these “truths” are broken.

Athletes as “Sites of Normative Intersectionality”: Critically Exploring the Ontology of Influence in Sport Coaching

“…Similar insights have also been provided by those using Giddens' structuration theory to examine how sports workers variously construct and negotiate their relationships with others (i.e., how they are simultaneously influenced and influencing) (e.g., Purdy & Jones, 2011;Purdy et al, 2008). Other researchers have respectively utilised poststructuralist (e.g., Foucault) and interactionist/dramaturgical (e.g., Goffman, Hochschild) colleagues (e.g., Denison, 2007;Denison, Pringle, Cassidy, & Hessian, 2015;Mills & Denison, 2013;Mills, Denison, & Gearity, 2020) have, for example, examined the influence of power and discourse on the experiences and behaviours of coaches and athletes.…”

Glitter and Guts: Narrative Portrayal of Sportswomen’s Experiences on a Coached Masters Team

“…Constructionism holds that meaning is collectively generated (Lee, 2012) and that our realities are influenced by social actors (Lincoln and Guba, 2003). Underpinned by a constructionist paradigm, the meaning behind the phenomena of this study was constructed from interactive relationships between researchers and participants (Crotty, 1998) and was framed from an understanding of women’s social identities through sport and in society (e.g., McGannon and McMahon, 2016), and coaches’ roles and power relationships within teams (e.g., Mills et al, 2020). We were receptive to, and cognizant of the nuanced social roles and lived experiences of the sportswomen by attending specifically to the coach’s role in the MAs’ experiences throughout the season.…”

Sports Chaplaincy, Theology and Social Theory Disrupting Performance-Based Identity in Elite Sporting Contexts

“…. normalise individuals into useful, docile bodies' (p. 73) has been taken up by a range of scholars investigating sports coaching (Denison 2007;Denison et al 2013Denison et al , 2017Denison and Mills 2014;Denison 2013, 2018;Mills et al 2020), strength and conditioning practices in sport (Gearity and Mills 2012), the implications of surveillance and wearable technologies in sport (Jones and Denison 2018;Jones 2019), as well as retirement from professional sport (Jones and Denison 2017). Lee Sinden (2013) has gone so far as to 5 Goffman's later work has also been appropriated for developing critical understandings of sport.…”

“…Foucault's work has also helped scholars understand how bodies become 'manipulable' as effective locations for the imposition of discipline that presides as a consequence of the unproblematised, limiting arrangements of elite sport. In particular, this body of work has collectively identified how entrenched coaching practices derived from the unquestioned 'disciplinary logic of sport' (Denison et al 2017) often lead to the "production of docile bodies reliant on being led or developed according to a set norm" (Gearity and Mills 2012, p. 132) from the dominant bioscientific articulation of the athletic body common to sport (Mills et al 2020). These 'set norms' are reinforced by the routine objectification of the body, these days typically through data generated by surveillance technologies designed to track and regulate the athletes (Jones and Toner 2016).…”