Why ‘the best way of learning to coach the game is playing the game’: conceptualising ‘fast-tracked’ high-performance coaching pathways

At the beginning of the 2013/2014 season in England and Wales, 90 head coaches of the 92 men's national professional football league clubs and 20 of the 22 men's professional rugby union clubs had tenure as a professional elite player in their respective sports. Moreover, Rynne [(2014). ‘Fast track’ and ‘traditional path’ coaches: Affordances, agency and social capital. Sport, Education and Society, 19, 299–313] has claimed that many former elite athletes are ‘fast-tracked’ through formal accreditation structures into these high-performance coaching roles. The reasons why former elite athletes dominate head coaching roles in professional sports clubs and why a ‘fast-track’ pathway from elite athlete to high-performance coach is supported remain unclear. Thereby the present study sought to address this issue by investigating the basis for ‘fast-tracked’ head coaching appointments. Eight male directors of men's professional football and rugby union clubs in England were interviewed to examine how particular coaching skills and sources of knowledge were valorised. Drawing upon Bourdieu's conceptual framework, the results suggested that head coaching appointments were often based upon the perceived ability of head coaches gaining player ‘respect’. Experiences gained during earlier athletic careers were assumed to provide head coaches with the ability to develop practical sense and an elite sporting habitus commensurate with the requirements of the field of elite sports coaching. This included leadership and practical coaching skills to develop technical and tactical astuteness, from which, ‘respect’ could be quickly gained and maintained. The development of coaching skills was rarely associated with only formal coaching qualifications. The ‘fast-tracking’ of former athletes for high-performance coaching roles was promoted by directors to ensure the perpetuation of specific playing and coaching philosophies. Consequently, this may exclude groups from coaching roles in elite men's sport. The paper concludes by outlining how these findings might imply a disjuncture between the skills promoted during formal coaching qualifications and the expectations club directors have of elite coaches in these sports.     

Modeling and simulating the dynamics of the “Death Star” shotgun target

Modern competitive shooting is a strenuous test of the human perceptual and motor systems. Like driving a race car or piloting a high performance aircraft, speed shooting matches require precise, rapid movements coordinated using a careful mixture of planning and reaction. In some disciplines of competitive shooting, this mixture is further complicated by complex moving targets. This paper develops a set of state space equations for a moving, reactive steel target used in professional 3-Gun competition. The equations for target motion are nonlinear, time-varying, and chaotic in certain regions of the state space. Once derived, the equations for target motion are validated against motion extracted from video. Then, the calibrated equations are implemented in real-time on a portable, laser-activated simulator. Applications of the simulation environment to marksmanship training and human motor control studies are also discussed.