A grounded model of the coaching process

The coaching process is a holistic, complex and context-specific enterprise. Thus, we cannot assume the simple transfer of research findings and recommendations from one situation to another. Yet, at the same time, there are sufficient similarities in what coaches do that allow them to be distinguished as coaches. Partly as a result of this paradoxical similarity and difference, the development of a universal model of the coaching process has been a popular but highly criticised endeavour. Consequently, the field of coaching lacks a theoretical framework around which its fragmented knowledge can be organised. This poster presents a new grounded model of the coaching process, developed during a longitudinal, mixed-methods case study of an “apex” rugby union coach. The grounded model helps to make sense of the complexity and scope of the coaching process in this one case, and serves to frame richer insights into the operational interactions of its components during the messy realities of coaching practice. In this sense, it is not promoted as a universal model of coaching, but as a heuristic device intended to contribute a much needed context-specific portrait of the coaching process. The extended value of the grounded model is to offer a framework for examining agreement and variation in other contexts, and thus to the development of a morphology of coaching as a recognisable but ill-defined enterprise.