Abstract
Comprehensive understanding and application of decision making is important for the professional practice and status of sports coaches. Accordingly, building on a strong work base exploring the use of professional judgment and decision making (PJDM) in sport, we report a preliminary investigation into uses of intuition by high-level coaches. Two contrasting groups of high-level coaches from adventure sports (n = 10) and rugby union (n = 8), were interviewed on their experiences of using intuitive and deliberative decision making styles, the source of these skills, and the interaction between the two. Participants reported similarly high levels of usage to other professions. Interaction between the two styles was apparent to varying degrees, while the role of experience was seen as an important precursor to greater intuitive practice and employment. Initially intuitive then deliberate decision making was a particular feature, offering participants an immediate check on the accuracy and validity of the decision. Integration of these data with the extant literature and implications for practice are discussed.
Highlights
Intuition is of increasing interest to expertise researchers (e.g., Dane et al, 2012)
2015), we were interested to build from our recent work in coach decision making (DM; e.g., Collins and Collins, 2012, 2013, 2015a,b, 2016b) to examine the role that intuitive decisions were perceived as playing in the repertoire of high-level coaches
Following the structure outlined earlier, we report participant views relating to the three main objectives, followed by other relevant material from the interviews relating to the
Summary
Intuition is of increasing interest to expertise researchers (e.g., Dane et al, 2012). The concept of nested DM (cf Martindale and Collins, 2007, 2012; Abraham and Collins, 2011; Collins and Collins, 2015a,b, 2016b) as a part of the application of PJDM (op cit) to coaching, saw higher-order/longer-term decisions as best taken in a more considered deliberative (CDM) fashion while immediate, in-session decisions were more shortterm and almost intuitive (more reflective of an NDM approach) The nesting of the latter within the former, so that short-term decisions generally took into account and catered for longer-term agendas, was suggestive that intuitive DM in a predominantly cognitive task such as coaching may show such an interaction. To what extent intuitive decisions interacted with more deliberative DM
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