APPLIED COACHING RESEARCH JOURNAL 2018 , Vol . 1
Are there any challenges / opportunities ?
I think the nice way of looking at research , policy and practice is just because one person is right does not mean the other person is wrong . If you consider a problem , say injuries in sport , and you invite people from a governing body , sports teams and an academic institution , they all look at it from a different perspective . The club is interested in reducing the injuries to increase performance , and the governing body has a duty of care to preserve the welfare of the players , and make sport safer . The academic wants to fully understand the problem ; they want to develop something that is robust , that contributes to not only answering the problem but also that is different and contributes to knowledge . This is a challenge as professional clubs care about the what ( is the risk ), rather than perhaps the why . We have some four-year projects at the moment with national governing bodies . The people in clubs find that frustrating because they might not be in that club in four years ’ time . But as researchers we are not confident that we can collect that data in a year and make meaningful conclusions . The way research has evolved is that not a lot of academic researchers also appreciate and consider the real world challenges , in addition to the academic component of research . This has resulted in some great applied collaborative research projects , so the problems that are in the real world are being fed back into institutions and we can do research to answer those .
What is the role of research within sport , and specifically coaching ? And how does it influence practice ?
In its general sense , it is to understand the sport better , to allow people who are in key influential roles to make better informed decisions . If we look at why they would do that , it would relate back to participation within sport , the development of athletes through the sport , and performance at the top level . Each of those has an element of science in terms of understanding injury risk , participation rates and performance . It is also important to consider that sport is an emotive industry ; our job is to make as many things objective as we can which allows the coach to make subjective decisions based on the knowledge and experience that they have .
People have been talking about bridging the gap between research and practice for 20 years , and are still talking about it now . Think of the efficacy of a study versus the effectiveness . Research can contribute to practice in two ways : by increasing the knowledge that people have who are working in the sport , which comes from efficacy ; and increasing the application of research within sport , which is the effectiveness .
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