Understanding the Change Process: Valuing What it is That Coaches Do

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Tania Cassidy’s article illustrates the difficulties that coaches may experience in reflecting in order to change their coaching practice. It also provides thought-provoking theoretical and methodological implications for how researchers and drivers of change, such as governing bodies, attempt to understand and advise changes in social endeavours, such as coaching behaviour. Cassidy accomplishes this through using Giddens’ Structuration theory [1] to help explain why messages of change are not received and enacted and why it is problematical to try to change taken-for-granted practices that exist in sports coaching communities. A strength of Cassidy’s article is how she describes the limited use of rational arguments when attempting to change coaching practice through reflection. The coaching research literature is very much dominated by rational thinking and often paints a very simplistic picture of the coaching process. Yet, Cassidy correctly reminds us that such arguments only go so far if they fail to acknowledge how coaches arrived at their decisions and thus subsequent actions. Coaches are being expected to take up, understand and utilise an increasingly complex, variety of knowledges [2]. Yet, despite the growth in the number of coach education programmes, coaches still cite coaching experience as the greatest source of professional development [3]. Nevertheless, it is widely acknowledged that experience is not solely sufficient for learning [4]. Instead, reflection is vital to experiential learning [5]. Rational arguments as how to change coaching practice through reflection conceive this process as straightforward. However, Cassidy argues that such arguments do not consider or do not give full value to the everyday practices in which coaches engage. This is her rationale for using Giddens’ Structuration theory [1], for the explanatory power of practical consciousness. With this in mind, I will begin my commentary with an outline of the limits of rational arguments in explaining the change process. This will be followed by a critique of Cassidy’s use of Giddens’ Structuration theory [1] within a sports coaching context.