The "Politics" of Coaching (part 3)
Sociology of Sports Coaching #2.3
I’m always trying to read books that stretch my thinking about coaching and learning. I recently read two books that stretched me a lot so I am writing about concepts from those books for two reasons. First, I don’t think these books are widely read so if I don’t share them with you, I don’t know that anyone else will. Second, selfishly, writing about these concepts helps me think through what they mean to me and how I could incorporate them into my own coaching. I see these as opportunities to wrestle with some big ideas in front of others. I hope you find these explorations both interesting and edifying.
The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter four, “Pierre Bourdieu: A theory of (coaching) practice”, written by Chris Cushion.
In part 2, I described Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field and began illustrating how habitus, capital, and field are interconnected. I alluded to the fact that the interplay between them is, well, complicated. In the language of social science, it is contested. That doesn’t mean sociologists argue about if the interplay exists, it means people interacting with each other bring different habitus and, therefore, different understanding and expectations. Those differences bring about challenges, conflict, and, hopefully, resolution and change.
Power difference and reproduction: the coaching process
An important factor the trap of “they don’t care how much you know” highlights is how much coaches follow what they see others do or what they believe other coaches value. This, in Bourdieu’s terms, is part social practice and part habitus.
Bourdieu developed the view that social practice is a central dynamic of social production (Brown, 2005). This means that activities such as coaching are likely to reproduce and legitimise [sic] certain orientations of coaches and athletes that gradually stabilise [sic] into schemes of disposition or habitus…Thus, coaching, like education, is a product of a particular habitus, which gives rise to ‘patterns of thought which organise [sic] reality’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 194). (p. 49)
Cushion is explaining that social practice produces habitus and habitus produces social practice. The first is learning, the second is reproduction. Reproduction is an incredibly important and incredibly under-appreciated part of social learning. Social practices change as individuals’ habitus interact in slightly different ways over time. But social practice is based in something, in some kind of history. It was there before you and it gave you some understanding of what you could do. Think of social practice as a hiking trail through a literal and figurative field.
Sometimes, like in the picture on the left, it’s clear where you’re supposed to go. Social practice has made the “correct way” obvious. Sometimes, like in the picture on the right, it is less obvious. There may not be a “correct way”. But that’s where habitus comes in. Are you a fan of stairs? You’ll probably go left. Do you have really great shoes you want to test out? Maybe you’ll go right instead. It depends on who you are and how you interpret the trail ahead of you. But the interplay between who you are, how you interpret things, and the “correct ways” of social practice deserves your attention.
Habitus thus disposes actors to behave in certain ways that have legitimacy within the field: the ‘correct ways’ at the expense of limitless others (Schubert, 2002; Cushion & Jones, 2006). This legitimacy can often obscure power relations, making them unrecognisable [sic] to, and misrecognised [sic] by, agents (Kim, 2004). (p. 49)
The trail example makes the interplay of habitus and social practice seem like a neutral thing. But remember I told you all coaching is political because social goods are at stake. Social practices can, and often do, stealthily limit your coaching in troubling ways. The most basic example of social practices limiting your habitus is the practice of coaching how you were coached. While the coaches you were exposed to may have been excellent, that doesn’t mean their ways of coaching are appropriate for you. Their ways of coaching are expressions of their habitus and are tuned to help them acquire capital they value most.
What ends up happening to novice coaches is they don’t discover and deliberately nurture their own habitus until they’ve already unknowingly built it around someone else’s practices. Again, this seems like a neutral thing, especially if you liked the coaches who coached you. But…
Actors’ acceptance of these arbitrary dominant values and behavioural [sic] schema leads to the development of an imposed system of meaning and symbols that, in turn, is ‘perceived as legitimate’ (Jenkins, 1992: 104). Bourdieu describes this process as symbolic violence where order and restraint are maintained through indirect cultural mechanisms as opposed to direct, coercive control (Jenkins, 1992). It is a form of intimidation that is not aware of its nature (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1996 [1977]). (p. 49)
This is why I think Bourdieu’s work is so important in coaching. Coaches often overlook that coaching is not just the technical and tactical; it’s not even just the psychological. Coaching is an expression of habitus. It is a reflection of the field. Both habitus and field encompass far more than the drills you choose or the strategies you use. For example, the typically active and talkative coach who becomes passive and quiet when their team is playing poorly is not using some coaching move they learned, they’re expressing their habitus. The coach who has a drill they only use for punishment is similarly expressing their habitus much more than they are demonstrating their coaching prowess.
Those are two examples of what coaches do that reproduces social practices that are coaching-adjacent but don’t seem to be straight-up “coaching”. Coaches may not have learned those exact behaviors from coaches they were exposed to, but they did learn that “coaching” can include these expressions of influence and control. Coaches use these behaviors to communicate messages to the players in their care, usually messages of displeasure and dissatisfaction. Coaches and players have learned that coaches can act on those emotions but players cannot. That’s the danger of unexamined reproduction of social practices.
They justified their dominating discourse as being in the players’ best interests, a specific motivational strategy to improve on-field performances. Similarly, the players did not perceive the coaches’ actions as overly discouraging, but instead saw them as part of professional football. (p. 49)
I’m not trying to make some version of the “players have all the control now” argument or the “kids today” argument. This isn’t about picking a side in those arguments. It’s about interrogating why those narratives exist and how they affect coaching and playing sports.
It’s unlikely you’ll see habitus and capital anywhere on the agenda at the next coaching seminar you attend. But habitus and capital are part of the fabric of coaching, so why aren’t those topics being discussed? I think the biggest reason for not talking about these topics is coaches’ lack of vocabulary around such topics. Bourdieu supplies a framework to have bigger and more important discussions. Cushion supplies some questions using Bourdieu’s language:
What is valued as capital? How is this attributed to coaches? What is this based on? How is capital valued? How is this determined, and attributed to coaches and players? What cycle does this create with those individuals involved in pursuing that capital? And, finally, how does it impact on coaching? No doubt coaches and coaching as a whole should question the status and necessity of capital within coaching contexts. (p. 52)
So let’s explore these bigger and more important discussions. Let’s question the status and necessity of capital within coaching contexts.
Consider the player who says “coach me hard”. A player like that brings a previously-formed habitus with them into a new field with a different hierarchy and different social practices. The coach sees a habitus that needs adapting while the player sees something missing from the field. What’s going to change? The distribution of capital (and power) in the hierarchy establishes that the player’s habitus will change rather than the coach’s style. The player doesn’t need to agree with the coach that their behavior needs to change, they only need to comply. This is an example of symbolic violence.
It’s symbolic violence because the coach doesn’t have to overtly force the player to comply. Players know if they don’t comply they will be labeled as “not coachable”, “not caring”, or “not competitive”. Getting stuck with those labels could cost non-compliant players capital, which would manifest as being benched, being isolated, or not receiving the same coaching as compliant players. Those outcomes are combinations of coaches’ habitus and “coaching”. I put coaching in quotation marks because the coaches’ actions aren’t clearly coaching behaviors, they’re just human behaviors carried out by coaches.
It’s symbolic violence because of the arbitrary nature of coaches’ responses to the player’s behavior. The field allows coaches to respond as they choose while simultaneously not allowing players to respond as they choose. There’s no clear connection between coaches’ behaviors and their values as coaches. These behaviors aren’t clearly used to help the player become “better”, they’re used to make the player comply.
Consider another example with similar implications, “buy in” from players. On the surface, it seems that coaches are trying to have players agree with an agenda the coaches provide. But again, even though coaches seek buy in from players, they don’t actually need it. Coaches can demand compliance from the player and non-compliance will have the same repercussions mentioned above.
In part 4, I’ll finish on a more hopeful note about how neither you nor coaching are as bad as it might appear, mostly because both you and coaching are capable of changing each other.
Jones, R. L., Potrac, P., Cushion, C., & Ronglan, L. T. (2010). The Sociology of Sports Coaching. Routledge.