Developing Creative Coaches: The Necessity to Acknowledge the Social

The principal purpose of this chapter is to better position creativity as a workable notion for coaches. Drawing inspiration from a recently completed Ph.D. thesis (Santos, 2023), it highlights the problematic issues of biography and ‘social norms’ when facilitating a group of coaches to be increasingly creative. In more detail, following an outline of traditional problems encountered by creativity, some related writings which form part of a ‘social turn’ within the wider field are discussed. Such work has increasingly highlighted the value of respecting the communal and cultural, whilst advocating the personal. We then discuss work in the discipline of sports coaching and, in particular, results from the aforementioned Ph.D. project which sought to identify precisely what the socially related constraints and enablers were in terms of coaching creatively. We next suggest what a socially-informed creativity agenda could actually look like for coaches, both in terms of a deconstruction and a subsequent imaginative reconstruction of practice. Finally, a reflective conclusion summarises the main points made, whilst highlighting possible future avenues of inquiry