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Research providing insight into how coaches behave has mainly been sourced from an athlete perspective or from observing and recording coach behaviour in context. Only a few studies have recognized the views of the expert coach as a potentially valuable source of information. Yet only coaches can provide insight into their histories, learning, goals, beliefs, knowledge, and decision making, and decode the complex interactions that occur in the dynamic context of coaching. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how elite-level coaches developed and used expertise. Twenty successful coaches working with Australian junior, elite sport participants were purposefully sampled to cover a diversity of sports (team and individual) and to provide a gender balance.

This thesis adds a new dimension to the analyses of the sport media nexus by examining the scope of the roles the media adopt during a crisis event in sport. Specifically, this thesis explores the ways in which the print media represents crisis events in sport, how the representation of crisis events is influenced by the organisational and commercial context and the extent to which this representation evolves over time. The thesis is comprised of three case studies: the debate over the South Melbourne Football Club's relocation to Sydney in 1981; the Footscray Fightback campaign to save the Footscray Football Club in 1989; and the Fitzroy Football Club's merger with the Brisbane Football Club in 1996. In each instance the case study is analysed using a theoretical framework of analysis, developed from the literature. As a result of the analyses, a new theoretical framework of analysis for the print media representation of context specific crisis events in sport is proposed.

The purpose of this research project was to provide an in-depth account of elite athletes' experiences of, and experts' perspectives on, overtraining and its negative outcomes. I conducted interviews with athletes and sports experts, including coaches, sport doctors, scientists, and psychologists across a variety of sports. The interviews were focussed on identifying personal and situational risk factors for overtraining behaviours and outcomes. This thesis includes discussions of the responses to the interviews from the athletes' and the experts' perspectives, with distinct approaches to analysing and presenting the interview data from these two groups' different perspectives. For the 14 experts, I carried out inductive content analyses of the interviews and presented the results in a tree-structure showing the major categories, subcategories, and raw data themes emerging from the data. For the 13 athletes, I used a narrative approach to analysing and presenting their stories, which I aggregated into three core tales, represented by three constructed fictional athletes. From the athletes' stories, I found support for the perspectives presented by the experts. I also uncovered, however, unique accounts of overtraining experiences that provided insight into the intra-psychic conflicts, sometimes obsessive-compulsive features, and complicated relationships of the not-as-perfect-as-perceived-to-be athletes. Taken together, both sets of interviews revealed that overtraining behaviours are significant issues in most sports, whether skill- or effort-based, which may go against traditional conceptions of overtraining. In the general discussion, I present a descriptive model of overtraining risks and outcomes, which came together from the synthesis of the athlete and expert interview results, and, finally, I discuss implications for professional practice and make suggestions for future research.