Coach leadership experiences in the management of difficult athletes

Coaching research has most often focused on positive coach and athlete behaviours and outcomes. However, less empirical attention has highlighted negative, problematic, and difficult athlete behaviours. Specifically, managing difficult athletes is part of a coach's role and responsibilities, so it is somewhat surprising that there is minimal research on the topic. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to investigate high performance coaches' experiences with difficult athletes, including how they effectively managed these individuals. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight Canadian Hockey League (CHL) coaches, who had an average of 21 years of coaching experience. The methodology of transcendental phenomenology (Moustakas, 1994) was used to better understand what difficult athletes were and how coaches managed these individuals by combining the strengths of thematic analysis with individual narrative accounts. The results indicated the coaches' common experiences with difficult athlete through five overarching themes: (a) instilling team culture, (a) difficult athlete characteristics, (c) fostering relationships, (d) managing difficult athletes, and (d) social influences and resources of difficult athletes. Specifically, difficult athletes were described as "negative star players" and "negative leaders" within the team, where they had a negative influence on teammates and impacted proper team functioning. The narrative accounts described that coaches learned how to manage difficult athletes through their personal experiences with them. The findings suggest that managing difficult athletes involves early identification, providing clear roles and expectations, enforcing consequences, and making progress through process goals to learn from mistakes. Coaches either transformed the difficult athlete behaviour by having them buy-in to team concepts or they were unable to make progress with them, which then led to the athlete being traded or deselected. The themes and narratives were synthesized to create the essence of the experience, which highlighted the coaches' commitment to athlete development by utilizing all of the resources at their disposal (e.g., assistant coaches, trainers, athlete leaders, billets). From a practical standpoint, this study provides insights for coaches, athletes, athletic directors, and general managers by highlighting the dynamic processes necessary to manage difficult athletes within an organization. As well, this study offers methodological implications for the application of transcendental phenomenology in the coaching sciences as an effective and systematic approach, along with theoretical implications for leader-member exchange theory within sport and group dynamics research.

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