“You Talkin’ About Practice?”: The X’s and O’s of Mentorship Planning that Lead to Cohesion and Execution

Where talent provides entrance, quality coaching and mentorship sustains success. This study explores the parallels between basketball coaching and academic mentorship. We seek to discover the collective beliefs, values, and assumptions that drive faculty to pursue doctoral mentorship through the lens of basketball. Through the framework of Culturally Situated Identity and Resiliency Coaching (CSIRC) framework, we provide a standpoint for viewing academic mentorship as culturally contextual, identity affirming, and multi-tiered. We employ a qualitative approach informed by a collective autoethnography (CAE) design to combine reflexive narratives of four doctoral mentors who created a doctoral mentoring program called the Scholar’s Pathway Collective. Through reflexive journaling, mentor focus group discussions, and film study, the mentors collected data on their mentorship experiences, assumptions, and purpose, with basketball coaching as a concurrent analogy. Through inductive thematic analysis, researchers found three themes: (a) seeing the game, (b) mastering boredom, and (c) in the gym. This study then concludes with a discussion of the findings and its significance for future doctoral mentorship.