“If It Feels Right, Do It”: Intuitive Decision Making in a Sample of High-Level Sport Coaches

Abstract

Comprehensive understanding and application of decision making is important for the professional practice and status of sports coaches. Accordingly, building on a strong work base exploring the use of professional judgment and decision making (PJDM) in sport, we report a preliminary investigation into uses of intuition by high-level coaches. Two contrasting groups of high-level coaches from adventure sports (n = 10) and rugby union (n = 8), were interviewed on their experiences of using intuitive and deliberative decision making styles, the source of these skills, and the interaction between the two. Participants reported similarly high levels of usage to other professions. Interaction between the two styles was apparent to varying degrees, while the role of experience was seen as an important precursor to greater intuitive practice and employment. Initially intuitive then deliberate decision making was a particular feature, offering participants an immediate check on the accuracy and validity of the decision. Integration of these data with the extant literature and implications for practice are discussed.

Implementing technical refinement in high-level athletics: exploring the knowledge schemas of coaches

“…A related limitation is that the generation of coaching knowledge may be tacit (Nash & Collins, 2006) and hence coaches may not be in a position to accurately report all of the origins of their knowledge. Nonetheless, it is suggested that expert coaches require an extensive foundation of declarative knowledge before they can effectively utilise 'skilled intuition' (Abraham et al, 2006;Collins, Collins & Carson, 2016;Nash & Collins, 2006), and therefore it is particularly concerning that none of the coaches reported any explicit knowledge of specific approaches to technique refinement.…”

The foci of in-action professional judgement and decision-making in high-level adventure sports coaching practice

“…The complexity arises in the nuances associated with the application and adaptation of the process, rather than in its' replication (cf. Collins, Collins & Carson, 2016). This raises a question of whether adventure sports coaching is or can ever be a simply procedural approach and it challenges the current employment of competency-focused training and assessment for coaches in favour of a combined process that includes a decisionand judgment-focused approach (c.f.…”

Techniques and considerations for monitoring swimmers’ passive drag

“…Coaches rely on their "gut instinct" in many aspects of coaching (Collins et al, 2016;Lyle & Cushion, 2017;Lyle & Vergeer, 2013;Roberts et al, 2019). Coaching intuition is often linked with quick reaction time (i.e.…”

“…Much of the existing research into coach decision-making labels non-deliberative coach cognitions as "intuitive" (Christensen, 2009;Collins et al, 2016;Day, 2016, Giske et al, 2013, Trottier, 2016, "instinctual" (Fiander et al, 2013;Gines, 2017, Lund & Söderström, 2011Thelwell et al, 2008), or "tacit" (Christensen, 2009;Nash & Collins, 2006) and "difficult to articulate" (Collins et al, 2016), among other terms, with little attempt to understand the experiences and knowledge used to make these intuitive yet clearly informed decisions. Nash and Collins (2006) argued that "seemingly instinctive" (p. 470) decisions made by expert coaches are a result of the dynamic and complex interaction between types of knowledge (tacit and declarative) and memories built from experience and reflection.…”