Hobby, career or vocation? Meanings in sports coaching and their implications for recruitment and retention of coaches

ABSTRACT

Rationale/Purpose: Traditional European sports clubs are facing increasing pressures to professionalise their services, while also encountering difficulties in the recruitment and retention of the coaching workforce. We used the concept of meaningful work to explore why coaching is worthwhile to coaches and how they have responded to the changes in the structural and narrative context of their work.

Methodology: Drawing on narrative inquiry, we explored the various meanings and justifications that athletics (track and field) coaches assign to coaching in Finland and England. Twenty-three coaches (8 women, 15 men) aged 22–86 participated in narrative interviews that were analysed using thematic narrative analysis.

Findings: The younger coaches mainly constructed coaching as a hobby and more often placed value on personal benefits, whereas many older coaches described coaching as a vocation/calling and emphasised causes that transcend the self (e.g. tradition, duty and leaving a legacy).

Practical implications: Understanding the diverse ways in which coaching is meaningful is vital for supporting the recruitment and retention of the coaching workforce in sport clubs.

Research contribution: The study extends understandings of meaningful work in coaching and how coaching is shaped by the broader structural and ideological contexts of the work.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteerism
• meaningful work
• coach identity
• career development
• narrative

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our participants for sharing their stories, Callum Tonge for assistance in the data collection, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Dik and Duffy (2009) suggested that vocation and calling are conceptually distinct in that only calling involves a source beyond the self (“transcendent summons”). However, this distinction is not widely adopted, some scholars use the terms interchangeably, and others use one of them only. Generally, the literature now favours calling over vocation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Alfred Kordelinin Säätiö [grant number 15143]; Opetus- ja Kulttuuriministeriö [grant number OKM/13/ 626/2015].