“One aspect of the coaching business.” Function and role of sports physiotherapists from the perspective of coaches in German elite athletics

ABSTRACT

According to social differentiation theory, professional activity of elite sports physiotherapists is characterised by potential conflict between the social logics of the medical sector and elite sports. Sports physiotherapists in Germany are part of the medical sector. By their work, they prevent illness and promote health. However, within the context of elite sports they run the risk of being instrumentalised for achieving victories in athletic comparisons. Using a reconstructive hermeneutic approach, the present study explored the function and role expectations of sports physiotherapists from the perspective of professional coaches engaged in elite athletics. Four semi-structured interviews were conducted. Two main themes were identified: 1) Attributed tasks and expected physiotherapeutic effects, 2) expectations on the physiotherapeutic time arrangement. Findings suggested that the narratives of the coaches were mostly bound to the agonal logic of elite sports and mainly designated sports physiotherapists as performance enhancers over health.

KEYWORDS:

• Elite sports
• athletics
• sports physiotherapists
• coaches
• professional conflict

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The economic sector, for instance, fulfils the problem of satisfying society’s current and future needs. The political sector implements collectively binding decisions. The sector of education ensures selection according to career criteria. The science sector of society is responsible for the creation and provision of true knowledge.

2. In Germany, physiotherapy is a licensed assistant medical profession (Heilhilfsberuf). Physiotherapists are only allowed to provide professional or commercial services with a physicians’s prescription. Because physiotherapists are subject to physicians’ instructions, they are, in a formal sense, actors in the medical sector (Hüter-Becker, 2004). In contrast to physiotherapy, sports physiotherapy is not a certified professional qualification in Germany but rather describes a field of professional activity or further training for licensed physiotherapists, massage therapists, and balneotherapists.

3. According to these ideas, people meaningfully construct their everyday realities according to specific methods, practices, and rules. The reality that surrounds people, and the reality that they participate in defining, is not objectively given but is socially constructed in processes of symbolic codified interaction. This results in basic methodological demands for handling this multiplicity of individual versions of reality in concrete qualitative social research. Qualitative data do not provide an objective reflection of reality but depict a reality sui generis that has been elicited interactively in the research process, and whose qualities, context and conditions of emergence must be subjected to critical reflection (Kruse, 2015).

4. The most important transcription symbols for understanding the quotations in the results section are the following (see Kruse, 2015, pp. 350–355 for detailed descriptions): emphasis and stressed syllables (capitalisation), pauses in speech (parentheses), lowering of the voice (_), raising the voice (^), stretching a vowel or interjections (=sound=), reformulations (/), breaking off in the middle of a sentence or a word without lowering the voice (–), unclear pronunciation (word in parentheses).