Coaching practice as discovering performance: the wild contingencies of coaching

While an enduring concern within coaching research has been to duly appreciate the importance of context, the tendency has been to treat context merely as a resource for analysis, rather than as irredeemably tied to situated practices of members. It is from this latter ethnomethodological position this study respecifies discovery work in coaching as an ordinary organisational achievement of coaches. To detail the artful practices of coaches’ discovery work, the study draws upon a corpus of approximately 20-hours of audio-visual recordings of football training sessions and match-day footage, combined with first-person embodied accounts of coaching. The examples comprise creating joint attention, accelerations of established problems, improving discovery, and silence in discovery. In this sense, rather than treat coaching as an imposed system, discovery work remains an ordinarily structured yet locally emergent and on-going procedure that coaches use to collaboratively establish a shared perception of the athletes’ performance and development.