Tracing the career paths of top-level women football coaches: turning points to understand and develop sport coaching careers

This study examines how women football coaches reach top-level coaching positions. Semi-structured interviews and a biographical mapping grid gave a sample of 19 women coaches the opportunity to identify factors that impacted their coaching career paths. Hodkinson and Sparkes' (1997 Hodkinson, P., & Sparkes, A. C. (1997). Careership: A sociological theory of career decision making. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 18, 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142569970180102.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) sociological theory ‘careership’, and in particular their metaphor of ‘turning points’ are employed to: (1) differentiate between the life events that shaped the women's coaching career development; and (2) outline and conceptualize the career decisions and types of learning that followed these events. The results demonstrate that the women coaches did not necessarily consider coaching as a possible career pathway before and when entering the occupation, but that ‘structural’ turning points enabled them to start and progress a coaching career. Further, ‘forced’ and ‘self-initiated’ turning points significantly affected career development. A key implication is for women coaches to develop ‘coaching career visions’, which can be created and reinforced through strategic entry points and associated support systems.