The capable coach: reclaiming relationality in coaching

This study contributes to the developing body of research examining the precarity of professional coaching. As ‘antidotes’ to such vulnerability, concepts such as resilience and coping have been promoted in ego centric ways. In doing so, the coach has been portrayed as an individual who must be self-sufficient, self-determining, and independent; a stance that ignores or excuses the influence of structural workplace conditions. The purpose of the present study was to challenge the salience of such personalised notions and alternatively provide a more nuanced, relational understanding of coaching. The dataset included 20 semi-structured interviews and 260 qualitative survey responses from part- and full-time professional football coaches. The findings, guided by a loose framework of affordances, recast coaches’ everyday practice as inherently interconnected and relationally accomplished. They illustrate how agency (and resilience) is bound to organisational constraints, always embedded within social relations and opportunities. Far from being a self-governing tenacious individual, the contention is made that the ‘capable coach’ is one who constantly navigates how action and influence are enacted through a wider arrangement of workplace relations. Coaches are subsequently presented as contextually sensitive interactants, capable of joint action that requires both individual intentionality and a sensitivity to situational dynamics.