definitions, challenges and critique
Bill Taylor and Dean Garratt
Introduction
In Western industrialised societies, professionals have long been valued and set apart from other workers because of their specialised knowledge and skills. Traditionally, these professional groups have been described in terms of an ‘ideal-type’; that is their quintessential characteristics or attributes, including a distinct knowledge base (a body of knowledge, professional authority and higher education engagement), organisation (professional association, monopoly and licensing, and professional autonomy) and set of ethics that guides professional engagement (service ideals, codes of practice and career concept). The models for these, it is argued, can be found in the antecedents and historical structures that have been associated with the classical professional occupations of theology, law, and medicine.
Recently, successive governments in the UK and elsewhere, seeking to influence and mould the occupational landscapes of contemporary society, have imposed a professionalising process on some sectors of employment (Stronach et al 2002). Under the pervasive influence of the ideology of ‘new managerialism’ – (both as political philosophy and policy doctrine), ‘archetype’ professions have been joined by new occupations, such as teaching, nursing, and social work. Increasingly, these groups are now finding that their practices, organisational structures, and notions of what counts as legitimate professional knowledge, are being fashioned and controlled by the state. This fracture between the traditional professional and arrival of new interlocutors gives opportunities for critical reflection, as well as producing openings for detailed analysis of the mechanisms employed in the contested discourses of professionalism.
Therefore, this chapter considers how sports coaches and the activity that is termed coaching might best fulfil individual (and collective) ambitions to undergo a process of professionalisation. That is, a process that would lead society towards viewing coaching as having the equivalent status of existing professional occupations. It would also allow coaches to improve their status and benefit from the many economic, social and cultural advantages that becoming a professional would effectively engender. The chapter will chart the position of coaching in its progress and relation towards full professional recognition. In doing so, it will highlight the considerable problems evident in transforming a mainly voluntary structure and workforce, towards one that can provide a sustainable future that serves individual sports, meets government directives and policy, and supports a new breed of sports coaching professionals. An examination of the literature dealing with the professionalisation of sports coaching will be provided, with the intention to indicate the limits of its potency, direction and conceptualisation. This will be supplemented with an examination of the contribution offered outside sport on the evolving nature of professional occupational structures.
In mapping this journey, the chapter will discuss the definitions, conceptualisations and discourses that surround notions of professionalism, professional practice, and professionalisation. It will then provide the theoretical frameworks by which the modern professional occupations have been examined, judged and critiqued. Finally, it offers the authors’ own critical perspective, drawing upon research findings of the lead author on the professionalisation of sports coaching in the United Kingdom.
Relevance to the coaching process/coaching practice
The ambition to see coaching transformed into a form of professionally recognised activity only really gained serious momentum when the government’s policy on sport began to focus more on the role of coaches, along with the coordinating structures that support their practice. Coaching began to be regarded as an important element in the drive to increase levels of participation in sport within society as a whole and, more specifically, as a means to enhance levels of performance in the international competition arena (Houlihan & Green 2008). With this increased attention placed on coaching, critical questions were raised about the quality of coaches and their practices across different coaching fields, as well as the ability of coaching support structures to meet new demands and competitive aspirations. The activity of coaching, that is, both its practice standards and underlying infrastructure, was seen as essentially ‘problematic’ due to a number of proposed solutions being contained within political and policy-driven initiatives. The considered opinion was that while the fragmented pattern of existing (organic) coaching provision had served individual sports reasonably well historically, it was neither sufficiently robust, nor of the appropriate scale to meet future ambitions.
Historically, in the United Kingdom, sports’ coaching has been largely confined to ‘grassroots activity’, prospering on the ‘good-will’ of amateurs and volunteers working from a broad base of voluntary organisations. The vast majority of individuals engaged in coaching do so within the frame of a voluntary ethos, often fitting in time and effort around other social commitments: job, family and individual sporting interests. Indeed, details from the Sports Coaching in the UK 11 Study (sports coach UK 2007) suggest that while the number of ‘self-reported’ coaches increased from 1.2 million to 1.5 million between 2004 and 2006, 70% of those coaches still receive no financial payment for their efforts. Further to this scenario of somewhat temporary and ad hoc engagements, there have been concerns expressed in relation to the quality and content of coach education courses, across individual sports and within the sector as a whole (DCMS 2002). Up until recently, individual sports had set their own standards, performance levels and terms of reference for coaches. Those with responsibility for the education of coaches were also affected by differing levels of training and varying degrees of knowledge and educational understanding. This rather confused pattern of differing traditions, standards and applications, while serving the immediate needs of each National Governing Body, actually did little to reassure government and its non-governmental sport organisations (NGOs) (such as UK Sport, Sports Councils & sports coach UK).
Movement towards a professional work force that could commit full-time to the development of expert knowledge, that might value and seek professional development and regard coaching as a sustainable career choice, would be crucial to the process of re-branding the coach, as well as re-designating the roles and responsibilities of the emerging new professional. The recent move towards professionalisation can thus be seen as a key element in the process of ‘up-skilling’ the coaching workforce. It is also crucial if the occupation of coaching is to play a greater part in the upkeep of the health of the nation, by increasing the public’s participation in physical activity and contributing to the success of UK international athletes. Another anticipated benefit of the development of coaching into a so-called legitimate profession – (underpinned by accepted standards of practice and sound education, ethical codes of conduct and well-formed career and development pathways), is that it will have a significant influence on all aspects and spheres within sport. Professional coaches should be able to raise levels of performance at the elite level, thus allowing athletes to compete with confidence on the world stage. In this respect, it is argued that professional coaches will be better equipped to inspire and engage young people into a lifetime of physical activity and better health. In addition, they will also be in a stronger position to shape and influence their own occupation as it develops and matures into an established part of Britain’s sporting landscape.
Defining professionalism
Scholars of professionalism regularly acknowledge difficulty in providing useful and inclusive definitions of professionalism, or indeed any of its associated terminology: ‘professional’, ‘professionalisation’, ‘allied professions’, or ‘the professions’. A number of bodies, including government and sports organisations, have laid claim to developing more inclusive and practical definitions of professionalism. However, matching the types of behaviours that professionals might be expected to exhibit, means that in reality, such rhetoric is beset by challenge, argument and notable exception. The ‘problem’ of defining professionalism and what is actually entitled has been considered by a number of authors. A sampling of the literature illustrates the point:
In spite of the growth in the number of studies of particular professionals and the frequent attempts at theoretical evaluations, the very term professional remains elusive … Seldom does a concept remain as slippery as does the concept of “professions”.
As Kalber reinforces, ‘neither practitioners or academics have precisely defined what acting in a professional manner entails’ (1995 p 106). Broadbent et al (1997 p 5) go on to suggest ‘ambiguity is present in the very notion of professionalism’. Indeed, Friedson, one of the foremost exponents and supporters of the subject, summarised the futile nature of this quest more than 30 years ago by stating that, ‘the use of the word [profession] is highly confused, and its definition for the purpose of scholarship and social accounting [is] a matter of wearisome debate’ (1973 p 19). While the confusion surrounding the true nature of professionalism seems justified, it does cause some consternation and concern for those within the sports coaching community. For while the term professionalism may deserve its ‘slippery’ rhetorical reputation, the fact that there is little agreement on what its practice actually entails does nothing to provide guidance for those ‘signing up’ to the professionalisation process, or, in fact, in being judged against the existing professions. This point is compounded by the inherent lack of clarity surrounding coaching, in terms of its own absence of definition, identity and conceptual boundaries (Taylor & Garratt 2007). In addition, within the sports sector in general, there is often confusion and conceptual misunderstanding around terms like instructor, coach, sports leader, teacher, trainer and so forth.
While at first glance traditional definitions of the professions may seem rather seductive when applied to coaching, they are inevitably beset by problems. First, there are difficulties connected with policy borrowing (Halpin & Troyna 1995) that render any straightforward transfer of professional terms, definitions and ethics, logistically problematic. Second, unlike some professions, for example medicine, where there is broad and common agreement and understanding, with a shared vocabulary for defining the profession (in terms of status, position and formal accreditation), coaching is decidedly more complex and diverse. Indeed, it has an altogether different set of values and traditions, within and across different spaces for sport. As such, ambitions to achieve a single and definitive or universalised set of definitions is at best conceptually challenging and at worst empirically untenable. Although of course there is an obvious need to address such apparently intractable problems in order to mature the process of professionalisation. In this sense, we suggest it might be more useful to conceptualise professionalism as a much broader concept and not as an end point. That is, an evolving ideology that helps mould and guide practice and interaction, and which moves away from being defined by a list of characteristics that fail to do justice to the dynamic nature of the professions, or, indeed, the processes of professionalisation.
In short, the diverse historical and cultural roots of British sports have left us with markedly differing languages, sporting traditions and attitudes towards notions of professionalism. While some, such as golf, tennis and football have long embraced professional coaching within their ranks, other sports have simply struggled to come to terms with the loss of amateurism and the moral position invoked by this void. The journey towards the professionalism of coaching in the UK will neither be unified nor integrated, for most sports start this process from different points of departure. In turn, these different starting points occasion differing degrees of engagement that are mediated through the associated conditions of commercialism, market interaction, and state regulation.
Review of literature
Until the late 1960s and early 1970s, successive governments had what can only be described as an ‘at arms’ length approach’ to sport, its national governing bodies (NGBs) and the coaching practices found therein (Coghlan and Webb, 1990, Roche, 1993 and Houlihan, 1997). Individual sports, and by implication their coaches, were seen as self-standing ‘experts in the field’, and the autonomy and sovereignty that this approach provided was valued and maintained by both sides (Green & Houlihan 2005). The 1970s saw a number of government reports and policy documents which began to draw closer links between sport and the state (for example, 1972 GB Sports Council established, HMSO 1973, House of Lords Report – Sport and Leisure [Cobham Report], 1977 White Paper, A Policy for the Inner Cities). While few of these documents made any explicit reference to the occupation of coaching, they did fundamentally alter the relationship between sport and government. This structured the agenda to employ sport (and by implication its coaches) as a social tool and bring it to the attention of a wider body of policy makers concerned with the welfare state (Brown and Butterfield, 1992 and Roche, 1993). The following decade saw a more explicit focus on coaching. The GB Sports Council strategy – Sport in the Community: The Next Ten Years (1982) – provided grants to NGBs for elite coaching and its development. In the mid-1980s the then British Association of Sports Coaches and the National Coaching Foundation agreed to formulate a ‘think tank’ to consider the future of coaching. Both the Sports Council for Wales (Coaching, Sports Science & Sports Medicine 1987) and the Scottish Sports Council (A National Strategy for Coach Education & Coach Development 1988) produced their own documents with the intention of co-ordinating and outlining the structures to enable coaching to develop.
Coaching Matters (Sports Council 1991) and later, UK Sports Councils’ The Development of Coaching in the United Kingdom: a consultative document (2001) formalised this call for a more integrated approach and focused direction. Both within this document and more recently, there has been a proliferation of debate concerning the professionalisation of coaching and of establishing a framework for a coaching profession (Sports Council 1991, UK Sport 2001, DCMS 2002). For example, in their Vision for Coaching, UK Sport strongly recommended that the standards of coaching be elevated to those of ‘a profession acknowledged as central to the development of sport and the fulfilment of individual potential’ (UK Sport 2001 p 5). Following the publication of the Government’s Plan for Sport (2001) came the establishment of a Coaching Task Force, set up to review the role of coaching and to tackle ‘the shortage of coaches, both professional and voluntary, and recognise coaching as a profession, with accredited qualifications and a real career development structure’ (www.culture.gov.uk/sport/coaching.htm, accessed 18/05/06).
While such deliberative policy moves have been united in their desire for coaching to undergo radical change and modification (and thereby benefit from the host of perceived advantages that professionalism will bring), few have gone as far as offering details on the actual workings of the professionalisation process. This was until the recent publication of the UK Coaching Framework (sports coach UK 2008). It would be fair to say that until this point, questions surrounding the ‘professionalisation of coaching’, ‘coaching as a profession’, and ‘notions of what it means to be a professional coach’ had been given scant regard by most researchers and commentators working in the field of sports science and its related, allied disciplines.
The early academic papers on the professionalisation of coaching (Chelladurai, 1986, Lyle, 1986 and Woodman, 1993), for example, tended to deal with the subject in a more limited, traditional and rationalistic manner, concentrating on the features that a profession would have to acquire in its efforts to gain acceptance and credibility (see Lawson 2004 for a general discussion). Chelladurai (1986) strikes a note of caution concerning the development of coaching as a bona fide profession. Comparing coaching with the archetypal established professions of law and medicine, he suggests that society is unlikely to bestow on coaching any notion of professional equivalence, or indeed the status and authority it effectively seeks. For Chelladurai, the fact that coaching is often judged by the measurement of performance-based outcomes and not by the nature of the process itself, and that it is generally regarded less significant than the practice of other established professions, like law and medicine, means that public acceptance and wider community endorsement remain highly improbable. Chelladurai suggests the way forward is for coaching to focus on internal developments that operate as a precursor to wider acceptance and professional status. In the early 1980s, a number of countries (Canada, Australia, France and Great Britain) were beginning to establish generic forms of coach education that would go some way to underpinning the development of coaching as professional practice (Campbell 1993).
For Woodman (1993), the professionalisation of coaching – ‘an emerging profession’ – was thought to emanate from the adoption and application of knowledge of the sciences. In this commonly cited paper, the author celebrates the increasing practice of basing coaching programmes, systems and decision making on a foundation of biophysical scientific knowledge. Woodman sees the rationalisation of the process of coaching along scientific lines, as evidence of a discourse of an emerging profession. Of course, this claim was further enhanced by the adoption of certain types of knowledge already accepted within other sports-science-related occupations, such as biomechanics, sports psychology and performance physiology. In considering the traits and characteristics of what a new coaching profession might look like, the paper deals with the issues in a factual and rather uncritical manner. Woodman reflects upon the nature of professionalisation and professional practice in a somewhat simplistic and fragmented fashion. Through a ‘deficit model’, the nature of coaching, coaching theory, the knowledge base for coaching, possible employment, deployment, and other associated elements are all dealt with separately. It is suggested that all coaching needs to do to achieve professional status, is address the shortcomings within these elements. Doing so will naturally produce occupational maturity and will automatically lead to a state of professionalisation and professionalism. This resonates with other work, in which the sub-issues of coaching are treated separately and independently, and without further reference to the social, political and cultural processes that are critical to any professionalisation movement. Those very processes, in fact, are particular to the structure of British sports coaching, operating along the lines of voluntarism and community action.
It is additionally interesting to note that the somewhat isolated calls made within this period by Petlichkoff, 1993, Dyer, 1992 and Sullivan and Wilson, 1993, to educate coaches in sociological and social psychological forms of knowledge, vital to producing an effective coach–athlete relationship, have generally gone unanswered. Indeed, it was not until recently through the emergence of Jones, 2000 and Jones, 2006, Jones et al., 2004, Jones and Armour, 2000 and Jones and Wallace, 2005 that these issues have re-emerged as important points of discussion, for much of the early work on the coaching profession was wholly descriptive in nature.
Adopting a rationalistic and functionalist perspective, much of the literature tried, with varying degrees of success, to benchmark where the occupation was within the professionalisation process and made further suggestions to enable the profession to move forward. Much of the discussion revolved around the occupation developing a common set of aims and outcomes, cutting across national and international boundaries. Yet at no time was any conceptual understanding shown of the cultural, historical and situational complexities engendered within the individual sports systems of different countries. Nor was any level of awareness demonstrated towards the individual and unique position of coaches in terms of their professional development. This dual preoccupation with ‘policy borrowing’ (where policy is imported from other countries on the assumption of a natural cultural ‘fit’) and benchmarking (particular grades of coaching in a predetermined march towards professional status), disregarded both the complexity and nuanced nature of NGBs, as well as the culturally rich heritage of British coaching as a whole. In fact, these assumptions served to divert attention away from a form of organic development that would have allowed coaches and their sports an opportunity to move beyond the limiting structures of volunteerism and towards something of an emerging occupation. That is, one that was mindful of it own history and location(s), yet which intended to bring the ambitions of practising coaches to the forefront in its own efforts to fashion professional definitions, understandings and occupational boundaries.
Lyle (2002) returns to the professionalisation process in his book Sports Coaching Concepts: A Framework for Coaches’ Behaviour. In this later writing, he considers wider issues that relate to the social status of coaching, both in terms of ‘ascribed status’ (the status given to an occupational group by virtue of their inherent characteristics) and ‘achieved status’ (gained through achievement, association, and success in the performance-coaching arena). He also suggests that ‘achieved statuses’ could be gained by the acquisition of certified qualifications. Citing the Office for National Statistics (2000), Lyle notes that sports coaching is now classified as an associated professional group and suggests that this position could be due to the ‘increasing scientification of practice and the value placed on sport itself’ (2002 p 200). Within this, he alludes to the lack of macro- and theoretical analysis of sports coaching and the inclusion of the professional status of coaching, by suggesting much critical commentary and empirical research has been ‘issues focused’. Consequently, Lyle has failed to contextualise key professional concerns, or indeed shed light on the tensions that are manifest within the wider social and occupational dynamics of sports coaching.
Other authors, namely Trevor Slack (who based much of his work on the North American experience) and Geoff Nichols (working within a British and European context), have approached the issueof professionalisation from the changing perspective of the role of National Governing Bodies (NGBs) within sport. These have been central players in the development of new structures to support the education and promotion of coaches and coaching in the UK. Thus, to discuss the professionalisation of sports coaching and its individual practice, without paying due attention to these organisations is at the same time failing to give appropriate consideration to their importance in the future development of the professionalisation movement.
Nichols et al in their comprehensive paper Pressures on the UK Voluntary Sport Sector (2005) begin to deal with this shortcoming. In so doing, they detail the shift in government policy to force NGBs away from a culture of ‘mutual aid’ towards one of ‘service provision’. Convincingly, the authors argue that the government’s agenda (and resulting pressure) to professionalise NGB services and operations, will force them to compete for membership and patronage in an increasingly competitive leisure market. The UK government has already allocated monies under the ‘NGB modernisation programme’ in order to provide additional support to this process and further develop commercial structures and business practices in the internal structure of individual NGBs.
Adopting a critical stance in their analysis, Nichols et al (2005) conclude that central directives and agendas are changing the very fabric and status of once-independent organisations. In addition, the continued linkage between the monies that NGBs can draw down from government funding agents and their ability to meet the government’s agenda has in some cases resulted in feelings of anger and resentment, a loss of autonomy and confusion of identity. In our own work on the professionalisation of coaching and the changing nature of coaches’ engagement (Taylor & Garratt 2007, in press), these feelings of disquiet and uncertainty have been articulated and expressed in a number of field interviews with practising coaches and NGB officers responsible for coach education or coaching structures.
A local football coach (level 2) commented when asked about the recent changes:
There is an assumption by government that professionalisation will mean a change in my behaviour. Well, I just don’t buy that. Just because I turn out each Sunday for the love of the game, and not for the money, and I haven’t got time to go on all these new courses, doesn’t mean I am not professional. No one came down to see me coach before making those assumptions.
A British Canoe Union officer and level 5 coach who holds a regional post added:
Sometimes it is difficult to keep up to date with all the new material … it is not just the rate of change but … but I mean … what it all means. We have to submit documentation with QCA-speak [sic] in it or we will get knocked back.
Later on in the same interview they said:
I have concerns … yes, many concerns about what we do … I mean do we [the NGB] represent our members or are we here to carry out government bidding. It’s like I have got two masters, one that voted for me in this position, the other funds the organisation [NGB] [laughs and shakes head].
Thus, while they (Nichols et al 2005) only allude to the effect these pressures are having on the occupation of coaching and coaches, working under the direction of NGBs, there must, in fact, be a relationship between the degree of support the NGB is able to provide to its own coaches while under pressure to modernise and align its internal structures and practices to a centrally imposed professional ideal.
Christine Nash (2001) in her study of volunteerism in Tayside, Scotland, considers the pressure on voluntary sports coaches, highlighting some of the inherent contradictions in government policy that focus on the value of volunteering (in terms of developing notions of community and citizenship), whilst also seeking to encourage certification within the field. This small-scale study suggests that voluntary coaches are less likely to accede to this subtle pressure, for reasons relating to the payment of fees, administrative processes and limited reimbursement of course costs. The issue of professional development of coaches is addressed by Jones et al (2004) in a study of elite coaches. They suggest that in a critical number of cases coach education courses were found to be of little direct benefit to the professional development of different areas of sports coaching. The suggestion is that in the past UK NGB coach education courses have tended to focus primarily on the technical issues of coaching, whilst ignoring the importance of the development of coaches’ pedagogical and conceptual knowledge and understanding. The inherent failure to intellectualise the process in this way has effectively undermined coaching in its claim to possess a theoretical body of occupational knowledge.
Turning to the influence of wider literature on professionalism, much of the debate within other occupations has been on how contemporary professional identities have been formed. These aspects relate particularly to the transitions within coaching which are likely to create plural identities, emergent cultures and traditions and/or locations that are situated potentially ‘in-between’ (Anzaldua, 1987 and Bhabha, 1996). This theoretical concern is compounded by debates concerning the nature of ‘professionalism’ rehearsed elsewhere, and beliefs concerning how the possession of more specialised forms of knowledge can lead to greater efficiency and improved performance within particular designate professions. General debates around the topic (Downie, 1990, Eraut, 1994 and Locke, 2001) are illustrated with numerous exemplars from teaching and teacher education (Guskey and Huberman, 1995, Day and Hadfield, 1996, Sachs, 2001, Day, 2002 and Bates, 2004), higher education (Middlehurst, 1995 and Nixon et al., 2001), nursing (Trnobranski, 1997, Humphreys, 2000 and Stronach et al., 2002), law (Moorhead, 2001 and Boon et al., 2005), the arts (Arts Council England 2005) and professional sport (Smith and Stewart, 1999 and Williams, 2002).
How does coaching measure up?
Earlier in this chapter, we argued that any characterisation of sports coaching through a simple list of traits and attributes has considerable methodological flaws. However, adopting such an approach does have a number of significant advantages. First, it provides a benchmark by which the current position of sports coaching can be measured against other established professions. Second, it allows sports and policy-making bodies to identify ‘the gaps in the picture’ which, in turn, encourages these organisations to direct attention and resources to deal with the shortfall. Third, such a methodology resonates with the wider policy-making community, as well as with other professions. So how does sports coaching measure up in any benchmarking process? And what are the attributes in need of particular consideration and/or specific remedial action?
A body of knowledge
Professionals by most conventional definitions are regarded as ‘knowledgeable others’; as such, professionals ‘profess’. Although this statement may seem obvious or even tautological, few authors writing on sports coaching and/or the nature of coaching knowledge have given any serious attention to this basic prerequisite: that the epistemology and practice (or praxis) of coaching involves being knowledgeable or expert in the chosen field. One exception to this apparent lack of attention can be found in the work of Potrac and Cassidy (2006). However, while the authors suggest a theoretical framework through which coaches might actively convey their knowledge, they do inadequately not deal with the thorny question of whether in fact there is a distinct body of knowledge to confer pass on? And yet, tellingly, the concept of a specialist body of knowledge is one of the central claims to authority of any professional, as it serves to define the jurisdiction within their chosen occupation. Without such a claim to rarefied knowledge, what is there to separate the professional coach from the merely novice ‘other’? While most sports can lay claim to a distinct body of sports-specific, technical knowledge, few are as confident when it comes to identifying a coherent base of knowledge that is deeply embedded in coaching practice.
There are no doubt excellent examples of professional-level coaching to be found among a number of sports. Those of sailing, skiing, golf, tennis, top-level soccer, and athletics have generated models of ‘best practice’ in coaching. But these have tended to be developed at the higher ends of performance where coaches are in full-time professional engagement. In addition, these ‘pools of excellence’ are rarely the products of a systematic and effective coach education process; it is more often the case that such coaches are generated by more exceptional mentors working either alone or in small isolated clusters.
In other locations and sports, there is something of a deep suspicion surrounding professionally generated knowledge, and a marked anti-intellectualism that has hindered the process of importing best practice from other disciplines and educational sectors. Taking sport as a whole, one of the patterns to emerge is that coaching practices and standards continue to remain unequal. They are often localised and have been seldom generated and inspired by productive NGB coach education systems (Jones et al 2004). In the UK, World Class Performance Programmes (WCPP) funded by the state, have allowed a number of NGBs to employ high-level coaches from overseas. The employment of these coaches has, in turn, witnessed the import of expert and specialised forms of external knowledge. These coaches, a number of them from ex-Eastern Block countries, are often products of mature, state-funded university-based coach education systems (Naul and Hardman, 2002 and Houlihan and Green, 2008). These are systems that are often based on a lengthy and theoretically involved framework of training, combining sports science with pedagogical theory. Unfortunately, the process of importing coaching experts to work with elite performers in the UK, has failed to percolate down due to the presence of ring-fenced WCPP funding and the isolated nature of their work.
Among other occupations the development of expert knowledge has been closely associated with the engagement of higher education. Indeed, many professionals in Europe and North America, such as teachers, nurses, and doctors, are educated to at least degree level. In fact, in some of the more established occupations, the professions themselves are responsible for regulating and tightly controlling the education and training of new professionals, with associations often taking on the roles of awarding body, university staffing and standards regulator. So, if coaches do have a claim to expertise where does this come from? In many sports, the coaching workforce has emerged directly from the field of current and ex-performers. Indeed, this relationship has been legitimised by a number of official (via state or sports organisations sponsorship) programmes that have ‘fast-tracked’ elite performers in to senior coaching roles. The assumption here is that because ex-performers have ‘been there and done it’ this ‘experience’ alone provides the adequate know-how and legitimacy required to work with, and coach other elite performers. It is argued that ex-performers are in a unique place to guide and advise others, particularly those in the arena of elite performance and competition. While this model may be justified under certain conditions, it does nothing to advance coaching’s claim to be mirroring the professional education processes of other allied occupations (Lyle 2002). It could also be argued, for example, that the assumptions upon which this movement is based serve to devalue the importance of developing pedagogical skills over time, as well as the experience gained from their application in the field. The model is premised on the assumption that ‘knowledge of how to do’ is easily transferred to ‘knowledge on how to coach, how to do’, in the absence of any educational experience on the part of the neophyte coach. Such schemes seem to have an almost mesmerising attraction to policy-makers, who actively work to privilege and promote ex-athletes in order to allow them to remain in the sport at any cost. However, such fast-tracking schemes can have the effect of devaluing coaching; educational processes should be more properly based on professional reflection and development over time, with emphasis on learning the craft in the context of practice. We do not fast track doctors merely because they were continually ill as children, so why coaches just because they once happened to be athletes?
The direct engagement of universities in the education of coaches and coaching in the UK has also been marginal. In fact, until the mid 1990s there were very few higher-education degrees explicitly dealing with the pedagogical fundamentals of coaching. Those that covered the subject did so under the dominance and guise of the biophysical sports sciences, where the skills required for successful coaching were often confused and conflated with notions of practical achievement and/or the distant application of psychology and physiology, as well as other biomedical approaches. In recent years, however, named coaching degrees have emerged across the higher-education sector. Bush (2007), for example, reported that in 2006 there were 192 undergraduate degree courses in the UK concentrating on coaching, representing 11% of all sports-related degrees. While these developments are to be welcomed there remain some concerns regarding the centrality of coaching pedagogy, and its theoretical underpinnings, within specific coaching degrees. One area, in which universities have made a valid contribution to the field, is in the generation of research and propagation of theoretical understandings around the coaching process.
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