Coaches’ internal model of the tennis serve technique: Knowing or understanding?

Abstract

The understanding of coaches’ knowledge plays a critical role in coach development. This study aimed to examine the internal models of expert and novice tennis coaches and to identify the key distinguishing characteristics between levels. Data was captured by in-depth interviews and analysed using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The results revealed that the internal model consisted of seven components including the “functionality” component that has not been reported previously. A significant difference was detected only in three components of the internal model: “reasoning chains”, “concepts” and “key flexion points”. The findings led to the conclusion that the main attribute of tennis coaching expertise is not pure technical knowledge but rather the perception of technique as a whole movement and the ability to understand the connection between technical elements. The findings provide a valuable contribution to tennis coach development as it can be applied in coach education to facilitate novice coach development processes.

Expert cricket coaches’ conceptions of the fast-bowling technique and how they coach it

“…While coaches didn't believe that there was an ideal bowling technique, they did appear to have a clear idea of what they thought made up a 'good' bowling technique (see Figure 1a). This is in line with findings from tennis (Fetisova et al 2021), sprinting (Waters et al 2020;Thomson, Bezodis & Jones, 2009), golf (Smith et al 2012;Smith et al 2015), ice hockey (Mell et al 2017) gymnastics (Cote et al 1984) swimming (Moreno et al 2006) volleyball (Bian, 2003) and climbing (Mitchell et al 2020). In these studies, expert coaches had clear internal models of the relevant sports technique, which was made up of the key kinematic variables identified in the respective sport-related biomechanical literature.…”

“…Several studies (e.g., Fortiza et al 2021; Smith et al 2015) have demonstrated that coaches are able to identify the key kinematic elements of a sports technique. Fetisova et al (2021) noted that while novice and expert coaches were able to identify the key kinematic elements of a technique, the expert coaches were noticeably different in their ability to chunk these elements into an understanding of the whole technique and had better understanding of the kinetic elements that this combination produces. The coaches in this study demonstrated similarly strong understanding of the kinematic elements of the technique and were able to chunk them together, particularly within the delivery stride.…”

“…In both cases, experts were better at identifying the connection between biomechanical principles and elements of the technique. Fetisova et al (2021) also looked at tennis serve technique, and while they found that the more novice coaches could identify the key technical components of the serve, experts were better able to piece the elements together, understanding both the technique as a whole and the biomechanical principles involved. Pulling these findings together we start to see that the Once the coach has conducted suitable analysis and evaluation, decisions must be made by the coach as to whether intervention is required for the particular athlete at that given time and within the situational context.…”

“…While no attempt was made in this study to elucidate differences in the coaches' conceptions (internal models) of the fast-bowling technique, between coaches, there appeared to be differences in the understanding of the different phases and particularly the 'functionality' of different phases and body movements. Fetisova et al (2021) study the difference between expert and novice coaches' internal models of a flat serve in tennis.…”

Development of the brief expertise scale for sports coaching

“…These limitations also compromise the capacity for sports coaching researchers to utilise established research approaches such as the expert-novice paradigm 7 and limit the widespread application of empirical evidence to the practice of sports coaching expertise because of reduced confidence in research findings based on the inconsistent and questionable methods used to determine expertise. 2 Consequently, the development of a method for measuring sports coaching expertise would be advantageous for enhancing the empirical rigour within this field of research (see [8][9][10] for examples of the various methods used to measure sports coaching expertise in the current literature).…”