Why ‘the best way of learning to coach the game is playing the game’: conceptualising ‘fast-tracked’ high-performance coaching pathways

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the 2013/2014 season in England and Wales, 90 head coaches of the 92 men's national professional football league clubs and 20 of the 22 men's professional rugby union clubs had tenure as a professional elite player in their respective sports. Moreover, Rynne [(2014). ‘Fast track’ and ‘traditional path’ coaches: Affordances, agency and social capital. Sport, Education and Society, 19, 299–313] has claimed that many former elite athletes are ‘fast-tracked’ through formal accreditation structures into these high-performance coaching roles. The reasons why former elite athletes dominate head coaching roles in professional sports clubs and why a ‘fast-track’ pathway from elite athlete to high-performance coach is supported remain unclear. Thereby the present study sought to address this issue by investigating the basis for ‘fast-tracked’ head coaching appointments. Eight male directors of men's professional football and rugby union clubs in England were interviewed to examine how particular coaching skills and sources of knowledge were valorised. Drawing upon Bourdieu's conceptual framework, the results suggested that head coaching appointments were often based upon the perceived ability of head coaches gaining player ‘respect’. Experiences gained during earlier athletic careers were assumed to provide head coaches with the ability to develop practical sense and an elite sporting habitus commensurate with the requirements of the field of elite sports coaching. This included leadership and practical coaching skills to develop technical and tactical astuteness, from which, ‘respect’ could be quickly gained and maintained. The development of coaching skills was rarely associated with only formal coaching qualifications. The ‘fast-tracking’ of former athletes for high-performance coaching roles was promoted by directors to ensure the perpetuation of specific playing and coaching philosophies. Consequently, this may exclude groups from coaching roles in elite men's sport. The paper concludes by outlining how these findings might imply a disjuncture between the skills promoted during formal coaching qualifications and the expectations club directors have of elite coaches in these sports.

KEYWORDS:

• Coach education
• embodied knowledge
• Bourdieu
• habitus
• practical sense
• respect
• coach recruitment
• symbolic violence

ORCID

Alexander David Blackett http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4948-0060

Notes

1 The titles of head coach, manager and director of rugby are interchangeably used across association football and rugby union. Although these roles are not entirely homogenous, for clarity, the term ‘head coach’ has been applied throughout this article with the intention to represent the individual principally responsible for improving the performances and ranking of each club's first team playing squad.

2 Biographical material for all head coaches was sourced by accessing individual profiles on each professional rugby union and association football club's website and cross referencing this with the respective online records of the coaches’ unions.

3 The referenced media articles report on the one example of Gareth Southgate's ‘fast-tracked’ athlete to coach transition in 2006 when appointed as head coach for Middlesbrough Football Club immediately after retiring from an elite competitive playing career.