My experiences implementing an athlete-centred coaching philosophy in an elite youth sport setting: An auto-ethnographic study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been suggested that the objectives of elite sport and positive youth development are sometimes in conflict (Fraser-Thomas & Strachan, in press). For example, elite-youth sport coaches may justify sitting players to secure the team’s win, with detrimental consequences to benched players’ confidence and self-image. Recently, there has been growing interest in an athlete-centred coaching philosophy – where attention is devoted to the overall development of both the athlete and the person, by providing athletes with autonomy, fostering a mastery-oriented environment, and creating partnerships within the coach-athlete relationship (Kidman & Lombardo, 2010; Mallet, 2005). In this study, I used an auto-ethnographic research design (Ellis & Bochner, 2000) to examine, understand, and negotiate my own experiences implementing an athlete-centred coaching philosophy as the head coach of a ‘AAA’ minor hockey team, within the broader social context of elite youth sport and positive youth development. Using self-reflection and journaling throughout the 2013-2014 season, I identified several challenges in my aims to facilitate athletes’ optimal performance and personal development including balancing the needs of individuals with the needs of the team given the pressures to win, creating a mastery-oriented environment within a results driven sporting culture, and developing the athletes individually while in charge of a team of seventeen players. Primary successes included fostering autonomy early in the season during the training camp, decreasing the pressures to win in important games, and developing my overall abilities as a coach throughout the season. Findings highlight the pervasive influence of winning expectations within the elite youth sport culture, and shed light on the complex ways in which these expectations interacted with my intended coaching approach throughout the season. Implications for coach education (e.g., the value of elite youth sport coaches self-assessing and developing their own skills) and future research are addressed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".