Sports coaching as action-in-context: using ethnomethodological conversation analysis to understand the coaching process

Abstract

This paper explores the turn to context within contemporary studies of sports coaching, observing that the theoretical progress in reconceptualising coaching as complex and contextually shaped social activity has not yet been matched by empirical studies explicating how coaching actually transpires as situated action. It argues that this imbalance is attributable, at least in part, to a research practice predominant within sociological research on coaching that involves mobilising theorised conceptualisations of context to specify the significance of social actions. The paper outlines an alternative understanding of context, shared by the perspectives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, under which actions and contexts are treated as being reflexively configured by participants in and as their ongoing accomplishment of intersubjectively intelligible social activities. It suggests that empirical investigation of coaching practices adopting an ethnomethodological conversation analytic approach (EMCA) stands to provide fresh understanding of the situated and contextual nature of the coaching process, and presents an empirical analysis of a video recording of a naturally-occurring coaching activity which demonstrates participants’ orientations to specific contextual features as a resource for organising a coaching correction. The analysis illustrates in a small way how one aspect of coaching, the correction of player errors, unfolds as a course of situated collaborative action, and thereby demonstrates how EMCA offers a research strategy by which coaching may be appreciated as a fundamentally social and contextual practice.