Alternative discourses in the coaching of high performance youth sport: exploring language of sustainability

Abstract

This paper focuses on discourses of coaching in high performance sports. Through three interviews with a youth swimming coach, I explore ways of constructing coaching practice. I examine coaching as an educational practice and use discourse analysis as an analytic framework. The notion of interpretative repertoires is employed as a specific theoretical concept to consider the linguistic resources that the coach draws upon. The results suggest that a variety of resources exist to make sense of coaching. Interpretative repertoires promoting alternative views of performance (i.e. not simply winning), as well as sustainable repertoires that emphasize well-being, learning for life and an equitable coach-athlete relationship, may provide alternative ways of thinking about coaching elite youth sports.

Keywords:

• coaching discourse
• high performance
• swimming
• sustainability
• discourse
• educational practice

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the interviewed coach for the opportunity to do this research. This research was funded by the Swedish National Centre for Research in Sports.