‘Sinking and swimming in disability coaching’: an autoethnographic account of coaching in a new context

Abstract

In terms of achieving wider health and social outcomes, sport coaching promises much for young people with disabilities. Despite this promise, the experiences and practices of those coaches who enter the disability sport arena are underexplored. This is particularly so for coaches who operate in community participation rather than competitive elite environments. Accordingly, this paper uses an autoethnographic approach to explore the experiences of a basketball coach (Colum), who enters a youth club for disabled participants for the first time. Utilising observational data, reflective field notes and interviews, five relativist vignettes are collaboratively constructed to represent Colum’s experiences across 12 basketball sessions. The vignettes reveal that the disability and community context disrupted Colum’s normative coaching behaviours. An emotional laborious journey is recounted that includes significant lessons, which may impact coaching practitioners, researchers and sport development officers. In addition, the post-sport context is introduced to differentiate the youth club context from Colum’s normative sport context. Furthermore, the concepts of liminality and ludic, which are novel to extant coaching literature, are introduced to explain how and why Colum struggled to find structure within the context of a youth club for disabled participants.

Keywords:

• Disability sport
• post-sport
• liminal
• ludic
• Turner

Notes

1. This refers to physical, sensory and intellectual impairment (DePauw & Gavron, 2005).

2. In doing so, we also adopted a social constructionist epistemology which assumes ‘disability coaching’ is a socially constructed phenomenon (Crotty, 2015).

3. The conception of rigour here occurs within a relativist ontology and constructionist epistemology that values subjective meaning rather than universal truths, and sees reality as local, social and constructed.

4. The authors accept that others may argue this type of work and setting is more akin to sport instruction or sport leadership than sport coaching. Nonetheless, the author is a qualified sport coach and was recruited as such by the centre who ‘wanted a basketball coach’. Furthermore, we would argue, that meeting the complex, multi-disciplinary needs of children involved in sport is youth participation coaching (Côté, Young, North, & Duffy, 2007) as recognised by the International Council for Coaching Excellence (2012), and would qualify as sport pedagogy (Armour, 2011).

5. For example, other readers may have chosen to emphasise and explore the emotional labour of coaching in this setting.