Abstract
While scholars have increasingly engaged with the (micro)political and emotional experiences of coaches in professional and semi-professional football, little attention has been given to grass-roots coaches’ understandings of these issues. The aim of this paper is to outline one possible research agenda that could contribute to the development of a rich and increasingly nuanced understanding of the everyday realities of being a grass-roots football coach. In particular, we consider (volunteer) coaches’ participation in grass-roots football to be an inherently relational endeavour. Following the presentation of a creative fiction that is based upon our shared experiences of being grass-roots football coaches, we then illustrate how relational thinking might be productively applied to exploring the social, (micro)political and emotional features of grass-roots football coaching.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Potrac et al., ‘“Handshakes, BBQs, and Bullets”: Self-interest, Shame and Regret in Football Coaching’; Nelson et al., ‘Thinking, Feeling, Acting: The Case of a Semi-professional Soccer Coach’; and Thompson et al., ‘“I Found out the Hard Way”: Micro-political Workings in Professional Football’.
2. cf. Nias, ‘Thinking about Feeling: The Emotions in Teaching’ 26; Jones et al., The Sociology of Sports Coaching.
3. Jones and Wallace, ‘Another Bad Day at the Training Ground: Coping with Ambiguity in the Coaching Context’: 119.
4. Potrac and Jones, ‘Power, Conflict, and Cooperation: Toward a Micropolitics of Coaching’, 2009a; Potrac and Jones, ‘Micropolitical Workings in Semi-professional Football’, 2009b; Potrac et al., ‘“Handshakes, BBQs, and Bullets”: Self-interest, Shame and Regret in Football Coaching’; and Purdy et al., ‘Trust, Distrust and Coaching Practice’.
5. Ball, The Micro-politics of the School, 19.
6. Potrac et al., ‘Coaches, Coaching, and Emotion: A Suggested Research Agenda’; Nelson et al., ‘Thinking, Feeling, Acting: The Case of a Semi-professional Soccer Coach’.
7. Ibid.
8. Jones, Edwards, and ViottoFilho, ‘Activity Theory, Complexity and Sports Coaching: An Epistemology for a Discipline’.
9. Jones et al., The Sociology of Sports Coaching.
10. Jones and Wallace, ‘Another Bad Day at the Training Ground: Coping with Ambiguity in the Coaching Context’; Jones, Edwards, and ViottoFilho, ‘Activity Theory, Complexity and Sports Coaching: An Epistemology for a Discipline’; and Jones et al., The Sociology of Sports Coaching.
11. Lusted and O’Gorman, ‘The Impact of New Labour’s Modernisation Agenda on the English Grass-roots Football Workforce’.
12. Green and Houlihan, ‘Governmentality, Modernization, and the “disciplining” of National Sporting Organizations: Athletics in Australia and the United Kingdom’.
13. O’Gorman, ‘The Changing Nature of Sports Volunteering: Modernisation, Policy and Practice’; Robinson and Palmer, Managing Sports Organisations.
14. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology; Crossley, ‘Networks and Complexity: Directions for Interactionist Research?’
15. Powell and Depelteau, Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues, 2.
16. Ibid.
17. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology; Crossley, ‘Networks and Complexity: Directions for Interactionist Research?’
18. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology.
19. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology; Donati, Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences.
20. Powell and Depelteau, Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues, 3.
21. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology; Donati, Relational Sociology: A New Pradigm for the Social Sciences; and Powell and Depelteau, Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical issues.
22. Ibid.
23. Powell and Depelteau, Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues.
24. Ibid., 2.
25. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology; Donati, Relational Sociology: A New Pradigm for the Social Sciences; and Powell and Depelteau, Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical issues.
26. Emirbayer, ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’.
27. N. Crossley, ‘Networks and Complexity: Directions for Interactionist Research?’; Powell and Depelteau, Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical issues.
28. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology; Crossley, ‘Networks and Complexity: Directions for Interactionist Research?’.
29. Ibid.
30. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology.
31. Ibid., 342.
32. Ibid.
33. Beames and Pike, ‘Goffman Goes Rock Climbing: Using Creative Fiction to Explore the Presentation of Self in Outdoor Education’; Jones, ‘Dilemmas, Maintaining “Face,” and Paranoia An Average Coaching Life’; and Sparkes, Telling Tales in Sport and Physical Activity: A Qualitative Journey.
34. Jones, ‘Dilemmas, Maintaining “Face,” and Paranoia An Average Coaching Life’.
35. R. Rinehart, ‘Fictional Methods of Ethnography: Believability, Specks of Glass, and Chekhov’.
36. Jones, ‘Dilemmas, Maintaining “Face,” and Paranoia An Average Coaching Life’; Sparkes, Telling Tales in Sport and Physical Activity: A Qualitative Journey; Tierney, ‘The Cedar Closet 1’.
37. Beames and Pike, ‘Goffman Goes Rock Climbing: Using Creative Fiction to Explore the Presentation of Self in Outdoor Education’, 5.
38. Barone, ‘Among the Chosen: A Collaborative Educational (Auto)biography’.
39. Jones et al., The Sociology of Sports Coaching.
40. Beames and Pike, ‘Goffman Goes Rock Climbing: Using Creative Fiction to Explore the Presentation of Self in Outdoor Education’; Jones, ‘Dilemmas, Maintaining “Face,” and Paranoia An Average Coaching Life’.
41. Beames and Pike, ‘Goffman Goes Rock Climbing: Using Creative Fiction to Explore the Presentation of Self in Outdoor Education’.
42. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 23.
43. Sparkes, Telling Tales in Sport and Physical Activity: A Qualitative Journey.
44. Jones, ‘Dilemmas, Maintaining “Face,” and Paranoia An Average Coaching Life’.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 109.
47. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 23; Beames and Pike, ‘Goffman Goes Rock Climbing: Using Creative Fiction to Explore the Presentation of Self in Outdoor Education’.
48. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology; Crossley, ‘Networks and Complexity: Directions for Interactionist Research?’.
49. Ibid.
50. Crossley, ‘Networks and Complexity: Directions for Interactionist Research?’.
51. Ibid., 347.
52. Ibid.
53. Kelchtermans and Ballet, ‘The Micropolitics of Teacher Induction. A Narrative-biographical Study on Teacher Socialisation’; Kelchtermans and Ballet, ‘Micropolitical Literacy: Reconstructing a Neglected Dimension in Teacher Development.
54. Kelchtermans, ‘Who I am in How I Teach is the Message: Self‐understanding, Vulnerability and Reflection’.
55. Kelchtermans, ‘Career Stories as Gateway to Understanding Teacher Development’, 43.
56. Kelchtermans, ‘Career Stories as Gateway to Understanding Teacher Development’; Kelchtermans, ‘Who I am in How I Teach is the Message: Self‐understanding, Vulnerability and Reflection’; and Kelchtermans, ‘Vulnerability in Teaching: The Moral and Political Roots of a Structural Condition’.
57. Ibid.
58. Kelchtermans, and Ballet, ‘Micropolitical Literacy: Reconstructing a Neglected Dimension in Teacher Development’, 766.
59. Heidegger, Being and Time.
60. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology, 33.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 33.
63. Burkitt, Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity, 127.
64. Burkitt, ‘Emotional Reflexivity: Feeling, Emotion and Imagination in Reflexive Dialogues’.
65. Burkitt, Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity; Burkitt, Emotions and social relations.
66. Burkitt, Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity’, 128.
67. Hochschild, The Managed Heart.
68. Potrac and Marshall, ‘Arlie Russell Hochschild: The Managed Heart, Feeling Rules and Emotional Labour: Coaching as an Emotional Endeavour’.
69. Hochschild, The Managed Heart; Turner and Stets, The Sociology of Emotions.
70. Kelchtermans and Ballet, ‘Micropolitical Literacy: Reconstructing a Neglected Dimension in Teacher Development’.
71. Theodosius, ‘Recovering Emotion from Emotion Management’, Sociology 40, no. 5 (2006): 893–910.
72. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
73. Burkitt, Emotions and Social Relations.
74. Ibid., 149.
75. Nelson et al., ‘Carl Rogers, Learning and Educational Practice: Critical Considerations and Applications in Sports Coaching’; Tracy, ‘Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact’.
76. Hunt, Walby, and Spencer, Emotions Matter: A Relational Approach to Emotions.
77. Jones et al., The Sociology of Sports Coaching.
78. Groom et al., ‘Writing and Representing Research’.
79. Ibid., 94.