Elite cricket coach education: a Bourdieusian analysis

Abstract

The social structures within coach education have been largely unexplored, undiscussed, and treated as unproblematic in contributing to coach learning, both in research and practice. The study used semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 11 elite cricket coaches to gather their perceptions of an elite coach education programme. In particular, this research attempted a more nuanced critical inquiry into the impact of culture on coach learning, habitus on knowledge production and the extent to which capital structures practice within the field of cricket coach education. Data analysis followed abductive reasoning, combining inductive thematic analyses of the data, with a deductive abstraction of these themes within a Bourdieusian framework to provide a level of explanation to the data. The findings present coach education as a complex social field in which coaches were active social beings in the (re)production of coaching knowledge. The culture of cricket was found to perpetuate a powerful doxic system that highlighted the tensions and conflict between an accepted model of coach education with a singular and prescribed body of knowledge and a strong underlying sporting culture and individuals hierarchically placed within it. This data further highlighted how coach education contributes to the (re)production of power within the field of cricket coaching.