Tracing the career paths of top-level women football coaches: turning points to understand and develop sport coaching careers

Abstract

This study examines how women football coaches reach top-level coaching positions. Semi-structured interviews and a biographical mapping grid gave a sample of 19 women coaches the opportunity to identify factors that impacted their coaching career paths. Hodkinson and Sparkes' (1997) sociological theory ‘careership’, and in particular their metaphor of ‘turning points’ are employed to: (1) differentiate between the life events that shaped the women's coaching career development; and (2) outline and conceptualize the career decisions and types of learning that followed these events. The results demonstrate that the women coaches did not necessarily consider coaching as a possible career pathway before and when entering the occupation, but that ‘structural’ turning points enabled them to start and progress a coaching career. Further, ‘forced’ and ‘self-initiated’ turning points significantly affected career development. A key implication is for women coaches to develop ‘coaching career visions’, which can be created and reinforced through strategic entry points and associated support systems.

Keywords::

• critical life experiences
• careership
• career decision-making
• coaching career visions

Acknowledgements

This research was co-funded by the 2013 João Havelange Research Scholarship (no grant number provided) and the Swedish National Centre for Research in Sports under Grants 2013-0048 and 2014-0198.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Hodkinson et al. (2008) used a sociological perspective of learning to develop the metaphor ‘becoming’. Within this perspective, the scholars consider learning to occur in any situation, but in relation to the position of individuals within contexts and the backgrounds, beliefs and intentions they bring with them.