Recent research has recognized sports coaching as complex, chaotic, and cognitively taxing for coaches. Against this backdrop, the present paper explores challenges faced by high-level coaches working with disabled performers. Specifically, it seeks to understand how coaches create mental models of performance in adventure sports and para-canoe. Five coaches were purposively sampled and underwent a semi-structured interview. A thematic analysis revealed conceptualizing the mental model as being mechanically-related for all and as including a social construction within the para-canoe coaches. Reflection on the coaching process and on personal characteristics were perceived as important to individualized inclusive coaching. Coach training should particularly emphasize the need for critical judgment and decision making skills within a similarly oriented social structure of coaches and support staff where applicable.
Observation of performance forms a critical part of the complex coaching process. A professional judgment and decision making (PJDM) framework enables optimum decisions to be made under time pressure and with limited information that derive from that observation. Observation and the associated decision making can be particularly affected by heuristic bias. We extend the work on PJDM via a greater focus on its relationship with observation within the coaching process. After revisiting PJDM and observation, we introduce and explore heuristics as a “tool” within the observation process. Specifically, we propose that observation is prone to heuristics built on a coach’s experience and understanding. We report on a small scale preliminary investigation with a group of high-level paddle sport coaches. We identify heuristics that both restrict and enhance the effectiveness of the observation in an effort to promote discussion and further research.
This practical advance paper outlines the complexity of simultaneously coaching in Olympic and Paralympic disciplines of canoeing. The paper integrates applied experience from the Tokyo Games with a critical review of disability literature to explore the importance of the creation of shared mental models to inform the development of a performance vision in elite sport. The paper first addresses the design and development of complex performance visions, which underpins the delivery of such elite programmes. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the paper addresses the fundamental issue that Paralympic sport is not a microcosm of Olympic sport and that performance visions and coaching processes created in an able-bodied environment cannot be cut, copied, and pasted into a Paralympic setting. Offering applied insight from this unique dual perspective, the paper discusses the complexity of designing a well-structured performance vision. We propose that although such performance visions developed in Olympic and Paralympic contexts share some similarities, the design of shared mental models needs to be bespoke to the performance setting. The paper articulates the additional complexities of shared mental models deployed in a paracanoe setting and offers recommendations as to how we can better support the construction of performance visions in Paralympic sport.
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