Filtering and finding a new way: a creative non-fiction of soccer coaches’ professional learning

This chapter illustrates how sport coaches learn to coach through idiosyncratic combinations of situations and opportunities ranging in formality, addressing a need for a more nuanced evidence base and a learning theory specific to coaching. Sport settings are often seen as an arena for athletes’ learning, development, and performance, yet those who coach also have their own equally important and impactful professional learning trajectory. Coaches filtered ideas through a ‘double-loop’ at individual and contextual levels and tried things out through practically-focused cyclical ‘reflective conversations.’ A more nuanced yet accessible way of depicting the findings that acknowledges the idiosyncrasies vital to coaches individualised learning can be beneficial. Representing post-positivist-informed, substantive grounded theory research findings as creative nonfiction sparked worthwhile considerations about the philosophical coherence and compatibility of these different approaches.