Passion and paranoia: an embodied tale of emotion, identity, and pathos in sports coaching

Abstract

In response to the wider call to put the person back into the study of coaching, this paper addresses my, the lead author’s, understandings of coaching an amateur women’s football team. Specifically, my co-authors and I critically consider how my embodied emotional experiences and meaning-making were produced in, as well as through, the interaction of the self and other in the club context. Following the presentation of my storied experiences, the complementary works of Burkitt and Scott are deployed as the primary heuristic devices. Here, our interpretation focuses on the interconnections between emotion, identity, and embodied experience. Rather than seeking to provide a singular truth, however, theory is, instead, used to reveal, clarify, and make ambiguous experience more apparent to the reader. In concluding the paper, we advocate a greater integration of emotion into ongoing and future coaching scholarship.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• identity
• social relations
• coaching

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Dr. Jim Denison for his insightful and helpful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.