Provocative, disruptive and re-orientating approaches to sports coaching research

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper originates from my personal struggles and dissatisfaction with the unproblematic treatment of methodologies, politics, and procedures of doing sports coaching research. In response, I offer a radical counternarrative where I apply disruptive and unorthodox guiding principles of postmodern thought and approaches to fieldwork, analysis, and writing. Although these approaches have received some attention in general sports scholarship (Munslow, 2012; Rail, 1998; Thorpe, 2012), incorporating a full commitment to postmodernist approaches to sports coaching research is still gaining traction. By way of contribution, I have used postmodernism as both a sensibility, and as a set of orientating principles that influences my thinking and encourage a rigorous reflexivity that creates novel ways through which to consider both the research process, and the process of knowledge creation in sports coaching research. I offer these reflections as an illustration of how postmodernism could be adopted as a scaffold for others.