‘ decision-making ’, and ‘ coach education ’, these remain contested notions , leaving us with pockets of disconnected research and frustratingly little consensus or clarity . This means that in thinking about coaching , currently , the nature of coaching practice is often taken for granted and assumed but is ill-defined and under theorised . These assumptions often mean that coaching is presented in an overly systematic and unproblematic way – an idea developed later in the article . Typically , and unsurprisingly coaching research has focused on the coach ( or coach educator / developer ) as the unit of analysis rather than coaching practice . This has resulted in limited exploration of coaching practice as the articulation between coaches ’ ( coach educator / developer ) experiences , conceptual understanding , pedagogical practices , and the wider cultural and political realities of coaching . As a result , we have weak and often impoverished notions of coaching practice that are insufficiently developed to inform coach education and coaching ’ s conceptual development in a sophisticated fashion ( cf . Lyle & Cushion , 2017 ).
Some twenty years ago , Ward and Barrett ( 2002 ) proposed a test of the utility and value of research to a practice community which asks the extent to which its findings are ( a ) used as recommended practices in the preparation of practitioners and ( b ) incorporated by practitioners in everyday practice . As coaching in some sports has grown and become increasingly regulated and ‘ professionalised ’ there are examples of research in sport coaching policy , as well as positive research examples to be found with interventions in coach education and coaching practice .
However , there is no evidence for the systematic application of these , or any other findings , in the development of coaching practice or coach education in terms of either research methodology or results .
Since Daniel Gould ’ s ground-breaking research with Olympic coaches in 1996 , research has repeatedly reported that coaches ’ practice and knowledge is largely uninformed by coaching research ( Lyle , 2007a ), but is instead developed overwhelmingly by informal sources , particularly observation and experience ( cf . Cushion et al ., 2003 , 2013 ; Trudel & Gilbert , 2006 ). This leads to a self-referenced anecdotal approach to practice based on ‘ what works ’ and a way of coaching that coaches perceive ‘ gets results ’, with the ‘ how-dimension ’ of coaching less the result of professional education than an ( uncontrolled ) effect of socialisation ( Cushion , 2013 ). Bruner ( 1999 ) describes these as ‘ folk pedagogies ’, i . e . often implicit but strong views about how people learn and what is ‘ good ’ for them . Typically , these are based on established sport-specific ‘ traditional ’ pedagogies ( e . g . Harvey et al ., 2011 ) and such ‘ traditional ’ pedagogy sets limits to coaching practice , what is regarded as useful and what actions , behaviours , and attitudes are considered acceptable . Importantly , this also creates a ‘ filter ’ through which future knowledge must pass ( e . g . Cushion et al ., 2003 , Stodter & Cushion , 2017 ). As a result , the increased research attention devoted to coaching , and the level of conceptual and theoretical development , despite pockets of success , has had little apparent impact on coaching practice or coach education . Therefore , a somewhat disheartening picture of the ‘ effectiveness ’ of coaching research to
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