Career progression, roles, responsibilities, and relationships of successful full-time assistant coaches in Canadian university football
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Coaches play a crucial role in the development of athletes of all age and ability levels. In order to fulfil their numerous roles, coaches rely on their support staff for assistance. Gilbert and Trudel (2004) noted that assistant coaches are involved in player evaluations, competition strategies, and the organization and planning of practices. In football, assistant coaches are particularly important due to large roster sizes and the specialization of playing positions. In Canadian University football, most coaching staffs have up to nine assistant coaches in addition to the head coach and three coordinators. Additionally, it is not uncommon for teams to have four or more of their football coaches hired on a full-time basis. Despite the important role of assistant coaches, the topic has been underrepresented in the coaching science literature. The purpose of the current study was to explore the career progression, roles, responsibilities, and relationships of full-time head assistant coaches in Canadian University football. Semi-structured open-ended interviews were conducted with six successful Canadian University football assistant coaches who had been serving in this position for a minimum of five years and who were recommended by a panel of experts familiar with this sport as among the best in their profession. According to the participants, their athletic careers helped them acquire both the knowledge and access that led to an assistant coaching position in Canadian University football. Once they started coaching, their progression was facilitated by attending various coaching clinics and interacting with professional coaches on a regular basis. A large part of their roles and responsibilities related to their appointment as unit coordinators (offence, defence, or special teams). Additionally, development and implementation of the team's vision along with involvement in the recruiting process of prospective student-athletes were all described as key elements of the job. The participants also explained the key relational aspects of their jobs with student-athletes, the head coach, and other members of the coaching staff. In sum, these results represent one of the first empirical accounts of the career progression, roles, responsibilities, and relationships of assistant coaches in team sports from the perspective of the assistant coach. The outcomes could lead to curriculum advancements of the National Coaching Certification Program (NCCP) with regards to the development and coaching responsibilities of assistant coaches.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".