Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".