The importance of context in athlete-centred coaching

Abstract

This chapter is premised on the view that skill learning and how all athletes’ perform are dependent on a multitude of context specific variables, which include both physical and social variables. Newell (1986) classified these variables as being either organism, or task or environmental constraints. We will spotlight the relationships between these constraints with a particular focus on the impact of environmental constraints to present an argument that skill is only to be found in these relationships and not in an individual athlete. Within an athlete-centred coaching approach one must take account of the environmental contraints. Being heavily influenced by the nature of environmental constraints over long periods of development and learning, we argue that skilfulness is a relational quality and not something solely embodied in an individual. Athlete-centred coaches must recognise the relationship between the athlete as an embodied individual and their embodiment in an enduring context of developmental influences, which act as constraining variables to determine the true nature of skilfulness. The above is a signal that we will focus on more than the athlete’s physical attributes, which we see as being just one contributor, albeit an important one, within an open dynamic system (Kelso, 1995). We will also draw on social theory to present the athlete and skilfulness as being socially constructed as two forms of sporting capital (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990, 2000). Here, we use the notion of sporting capital to show how and why athletes develop particularised conceptions of skilfulness and not others in the way Bourdieu identified social or cultural captial as inherently acquired through their involvement in field validated practices. The argument is that coaches and teachers need to understand the complexity of the social and physical learning and performance contexts to be athlete-centred, and in turn the athlete needs to see him or herself as being just one variable among many (a part of a team in team contexts) that determines emergent skilful performance outcomes. This is an ecological perspective that presents a holistic and relational understanding of skilfulness. In this way, while focusing on athlete development we try to decentre the athlete and recentred skilfulness as a relational quality performed by the athlete and/or athletes in particularised contexts. Skill is simply not attributed to a single athlete acting alone out of context and therefore we argue that athlete-centre coaches must focus on the more holistic environmental constraints that afford (Gibson, 1979) sporting capital as a form of cultural captial Bourdieu (1977, 1990, 2000).