Candidates’ experiences of elite FA coach education: tracking the journey

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a signifi cant increase in both the provision of coach education programmes and their evaluation (e.g. Chesterfi eld et al., 2010; Nelson et al., 2013). While this body of literature has provided scholars and practitioners with valuable knowledge about the role and nature of such programmes, little is known about how coaches experience them. This is not only in terms of their structure, content and assessment (Jones et al., 2004; Taylor & Garratt, 2010), but also in relation to coaches’ personal knowledge construction and how that knowledge is transferred into practice. The inadequacy of current coach education programmes to recognise such dynamics, particularly as related to issues of relevancy, was recently reiterated by Piggott (2012), who contended that coaches, across all sporting contexts, continue to place greater value on experiential learning than on formal coach education. Such courses, then, play only a minor role in the wider process of coach development and ‘are often treated in a rather instrumental fashion by coaches who rarely learn or implement any new ideas’ (Piggott, 2012: 538). Hence, they are continuously considered to be ‘fi ne in theory’ but, and crucially, largely divorced from the messy realities of practice (Jones et al., 2012).