Recognising, addressing and supporting the challenging nature of community sport coaching work: potential ways forward for research and practice

ABSTRACT

This paper critically examines key issues that continue to pervade the domain of community sport coaching. Specifically, we centre attention on a) conceptualisations of policy implementation and enactment, b) neoliberal working conditions and policies and their impact, and c) training and education currently offered to practitioners. For each issue, we map out some of the key concerns in both research and practice and the implications of these for community sport coaching’s ability to achieve its purported objectives. We then present potential future directions for research and practice before outlining, in the final section, specific methodological approaches capable of being deployed to examine and have practical impact for these specific issues in sufficiently complex ways. This article will be of use to community sport organisations, coaches, educators, managers, researchers, and others as they seek to enhance the criticality and interrogative nature of their work.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy enactment
• neoliberalism
• community
• coaching
• training

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. To expand our knowledge and shed light on how policy is developed, disseminated, and translated within community sport coaching, researchers may find the work of Bernstein (2000, 2003) to be a useful theoretical framework to adopt.

2. Although there is not room to discuss this extensively in the present manuscript, should readers wish to engage with more critical research on coach development, reflective practice, and mentoring, please see the work of Cushion, Griffiths, and Armour (2019), Griffiths & Armour (2012), Jacobs, Knoppers, Diekstra, and Sklad (2015), Leeder, Russell, and Beaumont (2022).