Observation, evaluation and coaching: the local orderliness of ‘seeing’ performance

ABSTRACT

Inspired by ethnomethodological attention to social order, the aim of this paper was to examine the visible, tangible and contextual details of how coaches’ observations, or what coaches actually see, are accomplished in practice. Drawing upon examples from a season long ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic investigation of a semi-professional football club, the paper positions coach observation, not as a visual perception, but as a locally organised achievement of the individuals involved. In doing so, attention is paid to the details of observations constructed in, through and by coaches, assistants and players. The paper concludes with some tentative recommendations for related progressive practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Coaching
• competence
• ethnomethodology
• seeing
• observation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Charles L. T. Corsby http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8639-5618

Notes

1 The ethnomethodological project which gave life to this study marks an attempt to develop empirical work into the sociology of social order (see. Garfinkel, 1967; Liberman, 2013; Livingston, 2008; Turner, 1974). To honour ethnomethodology’s uncompromising commitment to study the observable detail of ordinary society, participant observation was adopted as the principal data-gathering strategy. An effort was thus made to capture interpersonal behaviours, interaction, language, material productions, and beliefs over the course of a nine-month sporting season (Angrosino, 2007). In doing so, I, as the researcher, was positioned as a competent practitioner in the social phenomena under study (Rawls, 2002). I claim such standing as a player and youth team coach within the club in question, an involvement that spanned 4 years (in addition to a much longer history in other football clubs). This gave me a reflexive relationship between competency and setting, and a facility to make sense of contextual formulations and activities (Lynch, 1993). In being able to focus on the particular, the specific and the ordinary in the context, I, therefore, somewhat claim a ‘unique adequacy requirement’ (Lynch, 1993). Despite the assertion of ‘being there’, in line with the work’s interpretivist grounding, I do not, however, assert a privileged right to unproblematically speak for those under study. Thus, I accept that only a fragment of the story is represented here, as filtered through my (our) interpretations and sense-making lenses (Sparkes, 2002). In arriving at decisions of what I saw and what it meant, a thorough engagement with reflexive practice was undertaken; a process defined as a ‘thoughtful, self-aware analysis of the intersubjective dynamics between researcher and researched’ (Finlay & Gough, 2003, p. xi).

2 The examples presented in the paper are taken from a wider study that adhered to an ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic research design. The intention was to study and analyse the witnessable production and maintenance of social order within a semi-professional football club. In doing so, what is presented are the ‘doings’ of social practice (most noticeable the coaching that took place) within the context. Rather than recite developments and promulgate the use of disciplinary research methods, the examples in this paper are a return to the phenomenal grounds on which ethnomethodology was originally directed and based. In the semi-professional football context under study, Steve and Joe, as the principal coaches stood at the top of the social strata. More specifically, as the head coach, Steve made the final decisions on club structures, training times and team selection. Joe’s role, meanwhile, predominantly concerned supporting the everyday running of the club and the delivery of sessions. Both coaches had highly respectable playing and coaching careers that afforded them a claim to ‘know the game’ in the given context. For a fuller report of the methodological detail see Corsby (2016).

3 A host of features relevant to performance could be extracted, but the notions provided here were recurrent throughout the dataset. Whilst descriptions such as ‘second balls’ are relatively specific to the football context (i.e., for players to secure contested possession), the examples provided are illustrative of how the coaches constructed what they deemed important to and for performance. Reflective of contextual knowledge, in addition to ‘winning second balls’, as defined above, ‘checking shoulders’ referred to the need for greater spatial awareness ahead of the play, while ‘playing forward’ denoted the requirement to pass in a forward direction as a desired first option when in possession of the ball.