Disability sports coaching: towards a critical understanding

Abstract

The growing work that addresses coaching disabled athletes has thus far failed to engage with the field of disability studies, and as a result misses a crucial opportunity to develop a critical understanding of coach learning and practice in disability sport. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to bridge the gap between coaching and disability studies and to review critically the current literature in coaching, in order to problematise some of the assumptions that underpin disability coaching research. Disability studies, and in particular the models of disability, are an important first step in a critical understanding in disability sport coaching. The models of disability provide a lens through which researchers, coach educators and coaches can question how they learn to coach disabled athletes, interrogate knowledge about impairment and disability, and critically evaluate coaching practice. In connecting with disability studies, we hope to help coaches and researchers make sense of how they position disability, and appreciate how coaching knowledge and practice are produced in context. In turn, we feel that such critical understandings have the potential to develop nuanced and sophisticated ways of thinking about, and developing, disability sports coaching.

Keywords:

• Disability studies
• models of disability
• coach education
• coach learning
• coaching practice

Acknowledgements

Thanks must go to Nick Caddick, Andrea Bundon, Toni Williams and Emma Richardson for the invaluable discussions throughout the development of this paper.

Notes

1. Disability sport is a broad term used to describe sports that accommodate people with physical, sensory and intellectual disabilities (DePauw & Gavron, 2005).

2. The social model is neither a social theory in its own right (Oliver, 1996; Thomas, 2007) nor, strictly speaking, is it a model. It is perhaps closer to a conceptual tool. Because it is commonly called a ‘model’ in the literature this term will be used throughout the paper.

3. For a more applied sense of agency and structure in relation to coaching, see The Sociology of Sports Coaching (Jones, Potrac, Cushion, & Ronglan, 2011). These authors – drawing on Giddens (1984) – position agency as the ability of the individual to ‘exercise some form of power’ (p. 142), and structure as the expression of cultural rules and values that influence human behaviour.