Dr Nicola Clarke

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of parents of elite specializing stage youth footballers. Method: A descriptive phenomenological approach guided the study design. Data from interviews with five mothers and five fathers of youth players registered to English football academies were analysed using descriptive phenomenological analysis (Giorgi, 2009). Findings: Three essences characterized the phenomenon of being a parent of an elite youth footballer: parent socialization into elite youth football culture; enhanced parental identity; and increased parental responsibility. Parents’ socialization into the football academy culture was facilitated by their interaction with coaches and parent peers, highlighting the social nature of parenting. Being the parent of a child identified as talented meant that parents experienced enhanced status and a heightened responsibility to facilitate his development. Although parents were compelled to support their son in football, their instinct to protect their child meant they experienced uncertainty regarding the commitment required to play at an academy, given the potential for negative consequences. Together, these findings illustrate that parents experienced a transition as their son progressed into the specialization stage of football. We postulate that formal recognition of a child as talented contributed to this transition, and that knowledge of sport and perception of the parent-child relationship shaped how parents adapted. Conclusions: This study provides a new way of understanding the psychological phenomena of parenting in elite youth football. Implications for practitioners working with parents in sport are provided.

Youth sport parenting research, in psychology, has methodologically prioritised individual level analysis of the behaviours, perceptions or needs of parents and young athletes. While this has contributed greatly to understanding the role of parents in sport, children’s parenting preferences and the challenges of parenting in this unique setting, an exploration of parenting in youth sport from a dyadic, inter-individual perspective has received far less attention. Accordingly, the purpose of this research was to explore parent’s and children’s experience of their interaction and relationship, in the context of elite youth football. Eight parent-player dyads, recruited from English professional football club youth academies, participated in phenomenological interviews. A two-stage analysis process was performed to explore individual parent and player experiences and examine how accounts related dyadically. Findings present a detailed description and interpretation of the parent-player relationship; as one constituted by relations with other family members, an embodied sense of closeness, the temporal significance of football transitions, and gender relations. This research advocates the need for a view of parenting in youth sport that accounts for how interaction is experienced by both parents and children and highlights the importance of conceptualising parenting as an embodied, temporal process, constituted through interaction and the social context.

Recent interest in analytical pluralism – the application of more than one qualitative analytical method to a single data set – has demonstrated its potential to produce multiple, complex and varied understandings of phenomena. However tensions remain regarding the commensurability of findings produced from diverse theoretical frameworks, the practical application of multiple methods of analysis and the capacity of pluralism to contribute to knowledge in psychology. This study addresses these issues, through a critical interpretation of existing qualitative studies that utilised analytical pluralism. Using a meta-study design, we examined the use of theory, application of methods and production of findings in studies that had adopted qualitative analytical pluralism. Following comprehensive database searches, 10 articles were included in the analysis. Epistemological and ontological considerations, the influence of decisions made in the practical application of pluralism and approaches to interpreting findings produced from multiple analyses are discussed, and implications for future research are considered.

Despite research illustrating the socially constructed and subjective nature of talent identification in football, little research has explored how players make sense of ‘being talented’ and how this shapes their identity experiences. Five football academy players aged 11 years participated in five focus group interviews. Thematic and interactional qualitative analyses were performed to examine the content and function of participants’ talk. Findings described how players constructed being scouted as authentically choosing, or being chosen by, a club, which worked to protect or enhance participants’ talented identities and self-worth. Talent was regarded as dynamic, but players’ perceived expectation to continuously improve implied a potentially problematic view of development as linear. Evidence of early socialisation into the academy culture indicated that while effort was seen as virtuous, it was used to judge performance in comparison to peers, suggesting that effort had become a rhetorical device that reflected conformity, rather than player motivation.

A short report is provided of a meta-study of methodological pluralism in qualitative research; that is, of the use of two or more qualitative methods to analyse the same data set. Ten eligible papers were identified and assessed. Their contents are described with respect to theory, methods and findings, and their possible implications discussed in relation to a series of wider debates in qualitative research more generally.

Physical activity (PA) is an important lifestyle component of long-term health management for organ transplant recipients, yet little is known about recipients’ experiences of PA. The purpose of this study was to shed light on this experience and to investigate the possible implications of PA in the context of what is a complex patient journey. Phenomenological analysis was used to examine interviews with 13 organ transplant recipients who had taken part in sporting opportunities post-transplantation. Findings illuminate how participants’ experiences of PA were commonly shaped by the transliminal nature of being an organ transplant recipient as well as a sense of duty to enact health, self-care and donor-directed gratitude. This analysis underlines the potential role of PA in supporting organ transplant recipients attempts to live well following transplantation and makes novel connections between PA and our existing knowledge about challenges related to identity, survivorship, obligation and patient empowerment.

© The Author(s) 2020. In the context of an increasing clinical need to better support self-managemt for people living with long-term health conditions an interest in the role of social networks has emerged. Given that sport participation often provides opportunities for social engagement, a space to explore Self-managemt at the intersection of medical sociology and the sociology of sport has opened up. This article presents findings from an exploratory qualitative study with organ transplant recipients who have participated in Transplant Games events – national and international multi-sport competitions for organ transplant recipients. Our findings illustrate how sport-based Social networks serve as resources for health-related knowledge, provide participants with additional affective support and help shape health expectations for the future. Although sport-based Social networks were seen as an overwhelmingly positive resource for our participants, it is plausible that harmful unintended consequences could arise for patients with existing Self-managemt issues. As such, it is recommended that people seeking to use sport as a tool to enhance illness Self-managemt should consider the various and powerful ways that Social networks can be impactful and anticipate the potential consequences accordingly.

Children’s play is “any behaviour, activity or process initiated, controlled and structured by children themselves; it takes place whenever and wherever opportunities arise” (The United Nations, 1989). In addition, Bergen (2014) states that play is unique in its potential to develop a child’s creative, decision making, physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and communicative skills. Youth sport offers a unique context for children to access play experiences. When coaches utilise play within a safe, fun learning environment, this has the potential to enhance children’s holistic development, deepen children’s understanding of the sport they take part in, and harness internal motivation that will keep children playing their chosen sport for longer; consequently, helping to increase engagement and minimise dropout (Witt & Dangi, 2018). However, there are various barriers to coaches embracing play in sport including: a lack of understanding of the value of play; few development opportunities that focus on learning through play in sport; the belief that play is frivolous; and that play opportunities take time away from “true learning” (UNICEF, 2018). To begin to address these barriers, this presentation will outline an emerging framework of play in sport for coaches, that synthesises existing play theories and presents example activities that coaches can adopt in their practice to create more opportunities for play, and more playful experiences for children within youth sport contexts. Drawing on the author’s professional practice, recommendations for coaches and coach developers regarding the potential challenges and benefits of facilitating “time to play” in youth sport will be discussed.

In response to the deficit of women coaches in football, the Football Association have created various initiatives to upskill women coaches to enable women to progress within the coaching community. This chapter provides an evaluation of one of those initiatives—the “Elite Coach Menteeship Programme”—in order to share good practice and lessons learned in relation to establishing and delivering programmes designed to support the career development of high-performance women coaches. It first outlines the menteeship programme, including its purpose and context. Next, the chapter highlights the research evaluation process, encompassing the objectives and methods used to collect data, followed by coaches’ experiences of the programme. Youth Coach Developer involved coaches supporting in-club continuous personal development and mentoring, and providing regional and on-site coach support to professional club coaches. The chapter closes with some recommendations and implications for coaches, other sports organisations, and NGBs to effectively develop diversity and inclusion initiatives and improve gender equity.

The design and delivery of formal coach education and learning opportunities appear to be permeated by taken-for-granted discourses. These discourses exercise a systemised influence on the social construction of coaches’ professional knowledge, with potentially problematic consequences. Adopting a discursive methodology using discourse analysis, this study explored the ways in which facilitators and coaches in a high-performance coach education programme constructed coach learning. Data were collected over a two-year period using on-course participant observation (10 days), interviews with coaches and course facilitators (n = 29), and document analysis. Findings indicated a dominant discourse of ‘learning’ as a linear, mechanistic and unproblematic process occurring independently of context, and of coaches as experiential learners, which positioned participants as anti-intellectual and uncritical adopters of ‘what works’. These discourses functioned to reproduce relations of power between the facilitators (the holders of knowledge) and the participants (the recipients of knowledge). The impact of these discursive resources on programme design and delivery are discussed, alongside implications for elite coaches’ subjectivity and practice, in order to confront dominant and legitimate ‘truths’ in coach education.

Connections to existing coaching frameworks are limited within sport parenting literature, despite the need to help coaches translate research findings into their practice. In this presentation, we outline how the coach decision making model (Abraham et al., 2010), as supplemented with literature about sport parenting can be adapted to offer a tool for coaches to reflect on current interactions and plan future engagement with parents in youth sport. We suggest that a focus on the who, what, and how of coach-parent relationships moves beyond generic advice for what coaches can do to “manage” parents (e.g., Smoll et al., 2011), towards possibilities for creating authentic, productive, and context-sensitive collaborative partnerships. Knowing who the parents are that coaches work with (e.g., their experiences, backgrounds, beliefs, expectations) can help coaches to develop an empathetic understanding of individual parents, from which mutual respect can be fostered. Considering what coaches would prefer their collaborations with parents to look like (e.g., level of trust, respect, openness) and achieve (e.g., maximise positive outcomes for children, establish shared goals, minimise conflict) emphasises promoting desired relational qualities, rather than seeking to manage parent behaviours. Planning how to optimise coach-parent collaborations (e.g., enhance communication, build trust), allows for practical strategies to be adapted to fit the coaching context. Coach-parent collaborations will be positioned in relation to coaches’ personal beliefs, experiences, and behaviours, and the social norms, values, and resources of the context to enable coaches to reflect upon how to facilitate partnerships with parents in their specific coaching roles.

Within the world of sport, individuals always aspire to work at the top of their profession. As a result, there has been a growing amount of interest in the study of expertise and what makes an elite performer (e.g., Baker & Farrow, 2015; Farrow, Baker, & MacMahon, 2013). Bourne, Kole and Healy (2014) described expertise as elite, peak, or exceptionally high levels of performance on a particular task or within a given domain. Whilst expert performance and expertise has been widely documented in the athlete, research has paid less attention to the expert performance of other key stakeholders e.g., officials. A sports official is “someone who controls the actual play of a competition (e.g. umpire, referee or judge) and administers the rules and laws of the sport to ensure the proper conduct of a sporting fixture in a safe environment.” (Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, 2023). Although officials are considered vital to the sporting environment, as their decisions have the potential to influence the overall outcome of the match (Larkin et al., 2011), research has shown an increase in the scrutiny of officiating decisions and consequently an increase in the volume of verbal abuse directed towards officials (Dawson et al., 2022; Livingston et al., 2020). The current research attempts to provide a valuable contribution to the sparse officiating literature, but it also provides knowledge of expertise within an unexplored population within the officiating world: the cricket umpire. Moreover, the programme of work had the umpire at its centre by offering umpires a platform to voice their opinion of the i) demands of high-performance cricket umpiring; ii) the key competencies of high-performance cricket umpires; and iii) the opportunities that high-performance cricket umpires' access to facilitate the development of the competencies that, consequently, enable them to meet the demands of the role. Adopting Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory as a theoretical lens, a total of 11 demands (aligned with the Micro-, Meso- Exo-, and Macro- levels of the environment), 6 Competencies (Cognitive, Functional, and Social), and 7 Learning Opportunities (Formal, Informal, and Non-formal) were extrapolated from the data to form a framework for the professional development of cricket umpires. The results were discussed in-line with previous literature and recent organisational advancements (e.g., a competency framework for recreational officiating).

This paper seeks to explore the potential of embedding an intersectional approach to coach development practice, to contribute to addressing issues of social justice that permeate the field of sport and coaching, and manifest through interaction between coaches and coach developers (e.g., Gearity and Henderson Metzger, 2017; Rankin-Wright et al., 2017). With roots in Black feminism (Crenshaw, 1991), central to intersectionality is the recognition that race, gender, class, and similar systems of power are co-constructed, and produce interdependent, complex social inequalities (Hill Collins, 2019). In dialogue with other critical social theories, intersectionality offers a way of understanding how relations of power (structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal; Hill Collins & Bilge, 2020) manifest through social contexts to produce inequalities imbued in coach developer interactions. Intersectional analysis responds to previous work illuminating how coach developers’ biographies – including their identities – influence development and practice (Jones et al., 2023; Stephens et al., 2024). Through examining examples from programme evaluation interviews with coach developers, coach mentors, and coaches participating in positive action coach learning initiatives, we highlight some specific coach development practices where we propose intersectionality can be employed to generate critical awareness of the experiences of coach learners from marginalised groups. Until there is more diversity within the coach development workforce, critical reflection is necessary on our positionality as coach developers, and the privileges that certain identities afford in our contexts. Research has begun to consider how gendered power relations can problematically infuse coach mentoring relationships (Leeder & Sawiuk, 2021). Intersectionality calls us to do more, to not simply consider identities (and the power relations that produce them) in isolation. Critical awareness of how coach learners navigate intersecting inequalities including racism, sexism, ableism, and classism in their contexts, may have potential to help to build trust, authenticity, and collaboration within mentoring relationships. Our data suggest that in the absence of this, relationships can be perceived as superficial, inauthentic, and not for mutual benefit. To implement learner-centred approaches within programmes that are often characterised by high levels of predetermined content and assessment (Dempsey et al., 2021), coach developers can seek to understand the ways in which coaches’ oppressed identities enable and constrain their ability to engage with and apply learning. For example, how have some coaches been historically excluded from opportunities to acquire the meta-cognitive skills necessary for individualised learning (McCarthy et al., 2021)? This may partially disrupt the dominant discourse of learning as an unproblematic linear process, independent of context, that underpins much group-based coach learning initiatives (Cushion et al., 2021). Crucially, the goal of intersectional theorising and practice is not simply to add to the corpus of work demonstrating the nuance and complexity of coach learning and development. It is rather to seek meaningful ways of disrupting and challenging pervasive and unequal power relations that create conditions for inequalities to persist. We invite readers to engage in reflexive dialogue about what a more just, equitable, diverse, and effective coach development practice can look like.

Despite a globally recognised need for inclusive diversity among sport workforces, women are underrepresented in the inherently stressful profession of sports coaching. This study aimed to work with women sports coaches to answer the following research questions: 1) What demographic and contract-related factors are associated with job stressors? 2) What associations exist between job stressors, strain, and psychological wellbeing (PWB) at work? Women coaches (n = 217) volunteered to complete the revised version of An Organizational Stress Screening Tool (ASSET). Path analyses identified several groups of coaches (head coaches, “other” coaches, disabled coaches) who experienced more job stressors related to their coaching work. They also highlighted the importance of workload stressors and their detrimental relationship with psychological and physical strain but positive relationship with sense of purpose (i.e., eudaimonic wellbeing). Collectively, these findings offer the first assessment of women coaches’ job stressors, strain, and PWB, and offer insight to factors that may influence coaches’ engagement with the profession. They also highlight intervention foci for national governing bodies that are seeking to protect the health and wellbeing of the women coaches within their workforce.

Our ‘Belonging Framework’ is designed for those working in sports organisations. Evidence-informed, grounded in lived experiences, and created from a significant body of research from an internationally leading team of researchers in this area, its purpose is to move our thinking, conversations, and actions from a compliance or transactional approach to one that is more transformative and person-centred. Its value is in reframing the issue of inclusion, challenging our thinking and shifting our sense of responsibility through a focus on four anchors. Feeling Seen - Recognising individuals for both their performance and the unique life experiences they bring to the workplace. It’s about celebrating diversity in all its forms and ensuring people see themselves reflected across roles and leadership in the organisation. Feeling Heard: Providing employees with opportunities to voice their ideas and concerns, and then acting on them. Open, transparent dialogue in safe spaces is essential for driving meaningful change. Feeling Known: Employees want to be understood as unique individuals, with opportunities to connect meaningfully across teams and levels. Holistic understanding of both their professional roles and life outside work is key. Feeling Valued: Knowing your work and authentic self are respected, celebrated, and needed. A supportive culture that prioritises growth, development, and work-life balance is critical.

Research Overview: This research project, commissioned by BUCS and undertaken by the Centre for Social Justice in Sport and Society at Leeds Beckett University, was designed to respond to the recognition that volunteers from diverse ethnic backgrounds are underrepresented within university football, and as participants in BUCS football leadership programmes. The project sought to understand how football clubs, universities, and BUCS can contribute to enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in volunteering by producing insight to: • Understand who is engaged and not engaged in university football volunteering. • Gain insight into the football volunteer experience. • Identify the contextual conditions that enable or constrain volunteer engagement.

Working within the Centre for Social Justice in Sport and Society (CSJ) at Leeds Beckett University, UK, has provided opportunities for the authorship team to work with sports organisations on issues of equity, diversity and inclusion. What has become increasingly apparent is the need to conceive inclusion in ways that move beyond issues of access and participation, a policy or targeted programme. What emerges across our research projects is the significance of belonging to inclusion. Within this paper we offer insights into the embodiment of belonging through four processes – feeling seen, heard, valued and known which form our ‘Anchors of Belonging’ framework. We bring each anchor to life using examples from the CSJ’s research portfolio. We pose several reflective questions organisations might use as a guide to leverage the anchors and adopt a more proactive ­person-centred approach to create an inclusive environment for their workforce.