A Premier League Football in the Community Program’s “New” Coaches and Support Systems: Practitioner Reflections

Abstract

In the United Kingdom, many sport coaching career paths are considered to be focused on skills development, competence, and leadership within the context of performance. However, sport coaching also sits substantially within the community and youth sectors, where sport is seen to facilitate various social policy issues. Aligning nonperformance-related coaching contexts to existing formal qualifications schemes is problematic, given they frequently emphasize athlete and team performance. While an emerging base of studies examining community sports coaching exists, further insight and perspectives of in situ learning and coach support in this context are needed. Using observations, evaluation, and feedback centered on practitioner competence and confidence, and conducted over a 2-year period with 13 new community/grassroots sports coaches working with Albion in the Community (the official charity of Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club), we present some of the key findings and principles that we believe underlined their practice. These principles related to how, despite the majority being appropriately qualified at national governing bodies Level 2, they generally needed additional support and expertise for their specific (community) operational environment in terms of outcomes, practice design, and challenging what was seen as a focus on providing competitive (team) environments above individual player development.