Unsettling coaching’s foundations: turning post-modern/structural

Despite promising a wealth of well-meaning benefits, sport remains riddled with unfortunate experiences, injury, burn-out, abuses to name only a few. Beyond athlete experiences, coaches are often dissatisfied with the fact-repetition, role-prescription and passive inactiveness in sports science–focused coach curriculums. However, when presented with more critical content and pedagogies, such as post-modern/structural directed curriculums, many coaches, even at graduate-level, complain they are too challenging and disengage. Either the education is unconvincing or the gravitational pull of “type” is too strong, and the NGB (National Governing Body) post-modern/structural coach curriculum little more than a distant dream. In this article we aim to loosen the gravitational pull of “type” by unsettling the foundations “type” are anchored to, in the belief that unsettling the foundations loosens that pull and makes a post-modern/structural coach curriculum more convincing, and by extension, more likely.