In-depth, open-ended interviews were conducted with 16 expert Canadian coaches from the team sports of basketball, volleyball, field hockey, and ice hockey. The purpose of the interviews was to better understand the perceptions of expert team sport coaches regarding the characteristics, knowledge, and strategies that operate within their profession, and then to conceptualize the relationships between these various elements. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, and the unstructured qualitative data were analyzed inductively following the procedures and techniques outlined by Cote, Salmela and Russell (1995b). This process allowed the meaning units of the interview transcripts to be grouped into 79 tags and then regrouped into 22 properties. Six categories emerged from the analysis: coach-centered processes, organization, training, competition, athlete-centered processes, and contextual factors. The coach-centered processes category included the coaches' characteristics, knowledge, and strategies about personal growth and development, and ways of nurturing this process through continuous learning. The tasks of organization, training, and competition were central to their profession, with organization representing the point of departure of the other two categories since it was the foundation for training competition. These coaches were more than just efficient organizers, they were also highly motivated individuals who understood the magnitude of effectively outlining a global perspective to their team and then having the players comply with this mission. Training was based upon coaches' characteristics, knowledge, and strategies in physical, tactical, and technical training. Competition was a continuation and testing of the training process and the coaches played an active, integral role during each component of pre-, during-, and post-competition. Athlete-centered processes related to how the coaches perceived and dealt with athletes in such areas as empowerment and personal development, and how they chose athletes whose characteristics were compatible with the team mission. Contextual factors, such as level of competition and job conditions, also altered the organization, training, and competition categories of coaching. This research shed insight on the pedagogical strategies of expert teachers in sport by demonstrating how their characteristics, knowledge, and strategies drove the other processes of coaching.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/9903 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Bloom, Gordon. |
| Contributors | Salmela, J., |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 221 p. |
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