Understanding the career experiences and reflections of Special Olympics Canada’s National Team Program coaches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The most prominent competition for athletes with intellectual disabilities is the Special Olympics; however, there is surprisingly little research focusing on what it means to be an effective Special Olympics coach. The purpose of this study was to explore the career experiences and reflections of Special Olympics Canada’s National Team Program coaches. Thirteen Special Olympic coaches participated in individual semi-structured interviews. Guided by narrative inquiry, we analysed our data with a thematic narrative analysis; and using creative non-fiction, presented our findings in three composite vignettes. The first vignette illustrates Coach Sarah as head coach of the Canadian national team managing the complexities and stressors of athlete travel, medications, emotions, and behaviours. The second vignette is from Coach Jennifer who balances the demands of being a volunteer coach and parent of a child with an intellectual disability, and reflects on the creativity and patience required to coach in this setting. The final vignette is from Coach Michael, who reflects on how to improve coach learning and development for upcoming coaches in the Special Olympics, including providing formal mentorship and improving coach education for this setting. Using narrative inquiry as a theoretical and methodological framework, we were able to support the use of creative non-fiction as a learning tool for disability sport coaches. With accessibility in mind, these vignettes are readily available to be translated into coach education to provide Special Olympics coaches with common coaching experiences that can prepare and inform coaches of athletes with intellectual disabilities.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".