"It's not just your dad and it's not just your coach..." The dual-role relationship in female tennis players

Abstract

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Child-rearing in public spaces: the challenging dual-role relationships of parent–coaches and child–athletes of coaches in Swedish team sports

“…The distance strategy and the demands on separating the roles lead to interactions which may certainly be unsynchronised in time between adults and children, which may be especially confusing for a younger coach's child-athlete to understand. Schmid (2014) and Jowett (2008) also pointed out similar problems.…”

“…Unlike the results from the U.K. swimming context where parent-coaches and coach-children agreed on contracts about how to manage the dual relationships (Jowett et al, 2007) there seems to be more unconscious trial-anderror management behaviour in the interactions in the Swedish context. It is vital to educate and support parent-coaches in the challenges they may encounter due to these dual roles to increase the quality of children's sporting experiences and to reduce any damages that may occur to the familial parent-child relationship (Schmid, 2014). Finally, it is of major importance involving children in learning about the challenges they may encounter due to these specific dual roles rather than only viewing these situations from the adult perspective.…”

“…One explanation for the challenges is the difficulty of separating the parent-child relationship from the coach-athlete relationship (Jowett, 2008;Jowett et al, 2007;Weiss & Fretwell, 2005). According to Schmid (2014), there are blurred boundaries between these roles, which he concluded from a retrospective, narrative, social-constructive study on experiences of eight female tennis players in the United States. Similarly, Jowett (2008) showed that parent-coaches had the greatest difficulty in limiting the coaching role to the sport site.…”

“…Due to the dominance of the psychological theoretical framework (Jowett, 2008;Jowett et al, 2007;Schmid, 2014;Schmid et al, 2015;Weiss & Fretwell, 2005), it is critical to draw further attention to this phenomenon by applying an educational and sociological framework. Most of the previous research used a retrospective design, focussed on individual sports and athletes who participated at the elite level (Jowett, 2008;Jowett et al, 2007;Schmid, 2014;Schmid et al, 2015). By contrast, this study focussed on young non-elite participants with ongoing involvement in two team sports that no previous researchers have focussed on.…”