Sport Coaching Research and Practice

Research shapes our understanding of practice in powerful and important ways, in sports coaching as in any other discipline. This innovative study explores the philosophical foundations of sport coaching research, examining the often implicit links between research process and practice, descriptions and prescriptions. Arguing that the assumptions of traditional single-disciplinary accounts, such as those based in psychology or sociology, risk over-simplifying our understanding of coaching, this book presents an alternative framework for sports coaching research based on critical realism. The result is an embedded, relational and emergent conception of coaching practice that opens new ways of thinking about coaching knowledge. Drawing on new empirical case study research, it demonstrates vividly how a critical realist-informed approach can provide a more realistic and accountable knowledge to coaching stakeholders. This knowledge promises to have important implications for coaching, and coach education and development practices. Sport Coaching Research and Practice: Ontology, Interdisciplinarity and Critical Realism is fascinating reading for any student or researcher working in sports coaching, sport pedagogy, physical education, the philosophy or sociology of sport, or research methodology in sport and exercise.

Julian North is a Reader in Sport Coaching in the Carnegie School of Sport at Leeds Beckett University, UK

1. A New Approach for Sport Coaching Research 2. Psychologised Approaches to Sport Coaching Research 3. Sociologised Approaches to Sport Coaching Research 4. Disciplinary Agreements and Disagreements About Sport Coaching 5. Interdisciplinarity, Ontology and Critical Realism 6. A Critical Realist Informed Sport Coaching Ontology for Interdisciplinary Thinking and Research: Introducing the ERE Model 7. Undertaking Critical Realist Informed Interdisciplinary Research on Sport Coaching 8. An Ethnographic Case Study of Kayak Slalom Performer Development Coaching 9. Reflections on Sport Coaching and Sport Coaching Research