Abstract

There is a body of research on the challenges that coaches face when trying to implement athlete-centred coaching, but very little attention has been paid to the influence that the growing number of sport coaching degrees has on coaches’ beliefs and practice in regard to athlete-centred coaching. While studies have been conducted on sport coaches’ use of game-based approaches (GBA) to coaching, undergraduate sport coaching students’ interpretation of this coaching innovation has been largely overlooked. This article takes a step toward redressing this oversight by reporting on a study that inquired into the influence of the experiential pedagogy used in a course on athlete-centred coaching on students’ beliefs about coaching and their practice. The scholarship of teaching study adopted a constructivist grounded theory methodology to focus on five undergraduates in a sport coaching program with data generated through a series of three interviews with each participant. This study concludes that the experience-based course design was effective in influencing undergraduate students’ beliefs about coaching and their practice outside university.

Keywords

Sport coaching, higher education, Positive Pedagogy for sport coaching, coach learning, New Zealand, scholarship of learning and teaching,

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