APPLIED COACHING RESEARCH JOURNAL 2021 , Vol . 7
Editorial
Dr Katie Dray
Canterbury Christ Church University
Welcome to Volume 7 of the Applied Coaching Research Journal . It is a pleasure to be involved in bringing together another edition of innovative and exciting peer reviewed articles about coaching practice and coach development .
Like most people , I am a wearer of multiple hats , that include being an academic , a researcher and a coach . Underpinning all of these roles however , is the recognition in the value of making research informed practice accessible for practitioners to utilise . This edition highlights a number of topics that practitioners face as coaches or coach developers and provides some evidence-based recommendations for negotiating these , sometimes tricky , areas . As someone with a keen interest in coach and athlete learning , for me , the topics of this edition are all bought together by offering insight as to the importance of the learning environment . This includes navigating the online learning space for coach development , engaging parents in supporting athletes , encouraging the coach to be a problem setter and not a problem solver , and the importance of coaches truly understanding the context in which they operate .
The first article by Dr Lisa Whitaker presents some research findings from a study exploring the role of parents in supporting their child through coach-led activity . The article discusses some of the different support roles that parents fulfil as part of coachled activity and reasons why a parent ’ s role can sometimes appear to be one of conflict . The findings from the research presented here focus on the importance of relationship building in this setting and provide some insight into the mechanisms by which parents would like to learn more about their child ’ s involvement .
The second article by Dr Fabian Otte , Prof Keith Davids , Dr Sarah-Kate Millar and Jun Prof Dr Stefanie Klatt explores the ecological approach to athlete learning – an approach that emphasises the role of the environment in skill development . Considering the athlete to be a ‘ wayfinder ’, their article sets out some basic tenants of using this model for learning and describes important considerations for coaching practice . This includes how to design representative practices that replicate some of the performance-specific decisions that
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