Our intention for the book was to cover the constituent parts of the coaching process and current themes within the academic study of sports coaching. Our belief is that the book has been effective in providing an updated position statement in a range of topical coaching-related issues. In doing so, the book demonstrates something of the growing interest and research in the many facets of coaching and the coaching process. Importantly, the chapters have attempted, where applicable, to theorise and provide methodological tools for investigating a coaching process within which its operations and functions are shaped by social, cultural, historical and human factors. Indeed, the chapters demonstrate clearly that individual and supra-individual factors lie at the heart of the possibilities for the coaching process. For coaches and scholars alike this perspective provides important tools for the development of an understanding of coaching. Importantly, the book opens up, or rather insists upon, a number of persistent themes that pervade the writing, and an academic imagination that reflects the coaching process as much more than face-to face interaction, or the unproblematic transmission of prescribed knowledge and skill.

In this final chapter we are exercising our academic imagination and develop a number of themes, perhaps better described as ‘conceptual threads’ – that require further attention. We have taken the liberty of expanding on these, and we have unashamedly adopted a polemic position on each to suggest possibilities for intervention and change. It is not our intention to provide a similar position-style account as those in earlier chapters. We have deliberately set out to ‘make a statement’ about some issues in sports coaching. They are often conceptual in nature, but arise from both research and policy analysis. We believe that they have a very significant role to play in influencing the research agenda in this field.

In general, and when taken in aggregation, there is a certain untidiness or absence of concerted focus across the chapters. This is not a reflection of the quality of the writing, which was excellent. Rather it is the contextual or ‘situationally dependent’ caveats that were introduced into that writing. In addition, there were often unspoken or assumed emphases that arose from the use of youth sport or high-performance sport as the exemplar coaching environment. In our discussions this has led to a number of questions or issues that we felt have been inadequately dealt with.

The first of these issues concerns coaching domains. It has become increasingly obvious to us that coaching can only be understood in a particular context or domain. It is not simply that the coaching process (by which we mean the particular mix of behaviours, skills, functional and professional competences, technical demands, interpersonal relationships, intervention styles, and so on) is quite distinct, but that each domain creates a particular set of assumptions and expectations, within which we can understand coaching practice. We believe that it is axiomatic that sports coaching is not a unidimensional concept (see our later arguments about the scope of sports coaching), and that any attempt to focus on the generic nature of the coaching process masks the very distinctive and different forms of coaching practice throughout sport. Coaching domains is a useful mechanism for conceptualising the aggregation of behaviours and practice that characterise coaching in different sporting environments. Without an adequate recognition of domain-specific coaching practice and motivations we cannot hope to understand accountability and expectations in coaching, coach education and training, arrangements for professional development, research assumptions, or the development of expertise. In particular, any attempt to ‘professionalise’ must deal with these distinctive domains.

Some authors, however, question the relevance of domains to understanding coaching; asking if, for example, the competitive level of the athlete is a sufficient unit of analysis (Jones 2006). Jones (2006) attempts to reconceptualise the coach as ‘educator’, to introduce educational theory as a tool to understand better the coaching process. While this is useful to a degree, rhetorical talk about ‘educators’ carries the danger of fostering the acceptance of a weak definition of the coaching role and of relevant knowledge. This leads to a lack of discrimination about different sorts of knowledge used by coaches. Indeed, knowledge has been demonstrated in the expertise literature to be highly domain specific. By not understanding and differentiating coaching domains, we end up with a spurious equality for coaching and coaching knowledge. This, in turn, leads to an uncritical and undiscriminating way of understanding both coaching and learning, and the interdependencies between coaching and learning in different contexts.

Understanding the issues surrounding domains presents the challenging dichotomy between a desire to simplify sports coaching by stressing the generic components of the coaching process, and acknowledging the potentially context-dependent nature of skills, knowledge, personal relationships, objectives and working practices. Can the ‘coaching’ relevant to a beginner group of primary school children undertaking a taster programme in tag rugby be meaningfully compared to that of a full-time head coach of a professional rugby club? What is the balance of similarities and differences that might lead us to consider them sufficiently separate to demand individual attention? If the example given seems too obvious to be helpful, it begs the further question of whether each putative ‘domain’ is sufficiently homogeneous and how many domains are helpful or defensible.

Understandably, there are some obvious ‘drivers’ that militate against presenting too fragmented a picture. These might include a desire for employment/deployment mobility, the perceived benefits of a cohesive ‘profession’, a desire to promote the universality of coach education and training, and a conviction that coaching in one domain, for example, elite sport, should not be perceived to be more valued than in another. Similarly, the extensive range of sports with differentiating characteristics such as team versus individual sports or game versus performance sports, when allied to organisational variety (schools, clubs, local authorities, performance centres), and the ‘level’ or standard of participation, presents a complex framework that suggests that coaching will be very context-specific. The temptation to find coherence within this occupational diversity is understandable. At the centre of all of this variety is the performer – the youngster, the adult, the employee, the recreationalist, or the professional – each with different ambitions, capacities, and social and sporting capital. The notion of a coaching domain implies that there will be evident distinctions between the performers in these domains.

A coaching domain is ‘a distinctive sporting milieu in which the environmental demands lead to a more or less coherent community of practice, with its attendant demands on the coach’s expertise and practice’. The environmental demands refer to an accommodation between the performer’s aspirations, abilities and developmental stage, the consequent development and preparation provision, and the organisational and socio-cultural context. Remember that coaching domains are a conceptual device; each domain can be thought of as constituted by an aggregation of countless coaching contexts and episodes that exhibit a similar characteristic pattern. It is important to recognise that these domains are not differentiated by a single factor, perhaps the most obvious of which would be the standard of performance of the athlete. Rather, it is a combination of factors. For example, ‘community coaching’ may indeed deal for the most part with beginners in a sport. However, there are also factors such as the nature of the coach’s employment, an after-school context, the extent of the programme, a developmental ethos, and the presence or absence of external competition, perhaps a festival, all of which create a recognisable context or form of coaching.

How are these domains to be recognised? As we have argued, it is the combination of the performers’ aspirations and abilities, and their stage of development, along with the ‘reward environment’ that creates a particular configuration of coaching process. The ‘reward environment’ is the level of commitment justified by the perceived benefits from participation in that set of circumstances. A young person with aspirations to reach elite status and who is part of an accelerated development programme may commit significantly to preparation, training and competition, and be willing to amend her/his lifestyle to accommodate this. The adult club performer, who is operating within performance sport and organised competition, but who receives modest recognition and may no longer be part of that group of performers from which the elite will develop, is likely to commit to a limited programme of preparation and lifestyle adjustment. The result is a very context-specific coaching process with boundaries that are dictated by the circumstances. Before describing these coaching process boundaries, it is important to acknowledge the place of competition in determining the boundaries. To some extent, there has been an attempt to de-emphasise the place of competition, particularly in children’s sport. However, there is no doubt that the nature of the competition is central to both determining and understanding the coaching process. The possibilities range from short programmes without any external competition, 4–6-week programmes with a festival, regular weekly leagues competition, ‘circuits’ of scheduled competition in athletics, skiing, golf or tennis, and a series of representative matches. When taken with the perceived ‘standing’ of such competition, it becomes obvious that the nature of the competition programme will influence the coaches’ practice.

Coaching domains are likely to differ in a number of ways. These have been elaborated upon elsewhere and we need not expand on the implications of each criterion across domains. A ‘starter list’ might include: intensity of participation and preparation; complexity of performance components; coach recruitment, deployment and career development; interpersonal skills; value systems; the specificity of competition preparation; and scale and scope of the community of practice and other social networks. The result of these differences is a differential demand on the coach’s expertise and the nature of coaching therein. The coaching process that emerges from each set of circumstances will require different planning skills, tactical preparation, decision making, refining/teaching skills, resource management, interpersonal skills and so on. The knowledge base and associated skills will differ across domains. It is difficult to avoid suggesting that the higher the levels of athlete performance the greater the sophistication of knowledge and skills. However, this should be avoided. The coaching processes in each domain should be thought of as different, and presenting their distinctive challenges. Nevertheless, the arguments for distinctive perspectives on coaching are persuasive. Perhaps most persuasive is the argument that coaches will learn to ‘frame’ their roles and expectations within a particular set of personal, educational, and experiential circumstances.

Inevitably we attempt to identify a typology of domains. Trudel and Gilbert (2006) argue that a single typology of coaching contexts is required to facilitate research within a meaningful framework, and to assist with the design of coach education. They review a number of classifications, characterised by terms such as community, instruction, competition, professional, volunteer and school. They decide upon a typology of recreational sport, developmental sport, and elite sport. This they acknowledge is most analogous to Lyle’s (2002) typology (participation, development and performance domains), which they describe as the most thoroughly described, grounded in concepts of the coaching process, and consistent with empirical research on stages of performance development. Trudel and Gilbert go on to review the evidence (derived from Gilbert & Trudel 2004) on the characteristics of coaches in each domain under the headings of gender, age and experience, sport experience, motives for coaching, education, and stress and burnout.

There seems little doubt that recent developments in coach education have begun to acknowledge these domains. Trudel and Gilbert (2006) describe developments in the USA, in which different curricula for volunteer and professional coaches are proposed. An earlier coaching system in the UK had allowed for specialisms based on coaching children, adults and those with a disability. More recent developments in the UK, with the establishment of the United Kingdom Coaching Certificate endorsement system (sports coach UK 2004), have encouraged the development of ‘horizontal’ structures; that is, progress through increasing levels of award but within domains. Although this is not yet widespread, there are examples in gymnastics (distinguishing ‘general gymnastics’ from the competition disciplines), and swimming (distinguishing swimming teaching and competition).

Sports coaching is a catch-all and inevitably too imprecise a term; it is assumed to refer to all forms of ‘coaching’ activity, but the differences outweigh the similarities. Nevertheless, there is a political imperative to delineate an occupational boundary that is sufficiently extensive to justify its professionalisation. This may still be possible. However, sports coaching is not a synonym for all forms of coaching/leading/teaching/instructing, and this lack of precision is a very serious barrier to research, education/certification and professionalisation. Sports coaching is a ‘family’ title; it connotes a family of related roles, roles that are linked but with different degrees of engagement with the coaching process. We suggest that it must not be used as a shorthand term to embrace all of them. There is no one process that we can term ‘sports coaching’ that adequately covers all of the coaching environments.

Sports coaching is a generic term that implies ‘improving sports performance’ but its usefulness (other than to assist superficial communication) is limited. There would be little argument that the primary school teacher, the local authority summer programme coach, the community centre leader, the golf club instructor, the national league club coach, and the national representative squad coach are each engaged in different processes. This may seem obvious, but we have come to use the term indiscriminately. More seriously perhaps, our certification structures have uncritically implied, or assumed, that the family of roles are on a continuum, have an interdependent hierarchy of expertise, and have more similarities than differences; we beg to differ.

We have become convinced that the ‘concept’ of sports coaching has attained such a level of assumed genericism that in many ways it has become an unhelpful term. Throughout the collection of chapters in this book, but also the literature and development policy more generally, an imprecision has emerged about what the term implies. Once again we acknowledge that there are some perceived advantages to a unified concept, but the lack of precision is evident in research populations, and the extent to which generalisations about the findings are possible. This is partly to do with coaching domains, but more importantly about what is assumed about the processes and practices and their impact on knowledge and expertise. In our combined experience of the academic field, but also in coach education and development, there is confusion between role descriptors, levels of certification, the hierarchy of functional demands (the process), and the scope and range of the required coaching competences. We should not mix up role, domain, function, certification and expertise – and, although we tend to shy away from it, the standard of performance of the athlete/participants. This is not because of level per se but because standard of performance, level of reward and commitment, intensity of preparation and lifestyle commitment are linked to each other. More importantly, the family ‘groupings’ are not on a continuum, but efforts to ‘regularise’ the whole field may do great disservice to each group.

We question and doubt the education and development continuum implied by the certification structure (North 2009). While acknowledging the work of Erikson et al., 2007 and Gilbert et al., 2006, our extensive consultation and research experience suggests that much more work is required on career path regularities, recruitment, motives and prior experience in order to inform our conceptual frameworks. Sports that we have worked with are able to draw very clear distinctions between the roles of instructors and coaches, for example. We are also reminded of coach certification structures that imply a functional consequence at each level. The coach’s capacity is described in terms of their level of autonomous practice and readiness to operate within programmes that move from the sessional to the multi-year. This continuum will not apply across such populations as children’s sport, adult recreation, and even performance development for age groups.