Rationale and focus
On behalf of Sport Coaching Review, we are pleased to announce a call for abstracts for a special issue on policy enactment in sport coaching. This special issue will provide a scholarly forum for empirical articles that offer a critical understanding of policy enactment across performance, development, and community sport coaching contexts.
Coaching scholarship has tended to provide accounts of practice that are disconnected from the policy environment within which such work occurs. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that many practitioners and coaching researchers do not readily associate everyday coaching practice with matters of policy. In a recent Sport Coaching Review publication, we contested this position and contended that workers in the field of sport coaching are active players in the policy process, shaping the meanings, experiences, and attainment of policy in these settings.
We are now inviting expressions of interest from scholars who are actively researching how coaches strategically navigate their policy environments. Consideration may be given to the following (or related) areas: 1) the translation and enactment of policy in(to) practice; 2) those political skills that coaches use when enacting policy; 3) the performative and fabricated features of policy enactment; 4) the management of one’s own and others’ emotions; 5) the relative value of available education, training, and development programmes; and 6) the impacts of policy work for coaches’ wellbeing.
