“There’s No One-Size-Fits-All Approach”: Challenges and Strategies Coaching Preschooler Sport in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Coaches are seminal figures within sport, playing a key role in youths’ development, particularly when their approach and practices suit the age and context in which they are coaching. However, little is known about coaches’ experiences within early years (<6) sport. This case study examined coaches’ experiences in early years sport, revealing challenges-faced and strategies drawn-upon for effective coaching. Semistructured interviews with 10 coaches ( M age = 37.8; 7 male) leading multisport, soccer, dance, rugby, hockey, and t-ball programming to children 2–5 years contributed insights. Key challenges included children’s resistance to participate and varied ability levels; however, these were mitigated by creative best practices focused on age-appropriate delivery (e.g., use of stories/imagination, “classroom” management). Notably, effective strategies were often offered by coaches from private and club-based programs, whereas community-based volunteer coaches received less age-specific training and resources and had more turnover. Broader societal-level challenges related to parental expectations and pressures were also discussed. Findings highlight early years sport as a unique context in which interpersonal and intrapersonal coaching knowledge appear most critical. Identified best practices may support early years sport coaches in their day-to-day roles while highlighting the importance of preparing all early years sport coaches to deliver effective age-appropriate programming.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".