Coach Education and Continuing Professional Development: Experience and Learning to Coach

Research over the last decade has demonstrated that it is experience and the observation of other coaches that remain the primary sources of knowledge for coaches. Despite this, coach education and continuing professional devel-opment fail to draw effectively on this experience. Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper attempts to understand how the “art of coaching ” can be characterized as structured improvisation and how experience is crucial to structuring coaching practice. An examination of current coach education and assessment demonstrates that coaching practice viewed as a composite of knowledge has not specifically addressed the pervasive influence of experi-ence on coaching practice. Drawing on experiences from the educational field, we examine how coach education and continuing professional development can utilize mentoring and critical reflection to situate learning in the practical experience of coaching. Until recently, although the importance of coaching to athlete development and national sporting success was increasingly being realized (Sports Coach UK, 2002), there was little agreement as to a future strategic direction for the burgeon-ing profession. A recent commissioned report (“The development of coaching in the United Kingdom, ” 1999) brought this situation into stark relief and, subse-quently, initiated a process whereby the government-funded Sports Strategy Coach-