Pierre Trudel

University of Ottawa · School of Human Kinetics

Following a request from a Brazilian multisport club, a group of researchers proposed a collaborative initiative to develop the coaches. Both coaches and administrators said they were delighted with the new perspective and learning opportunities. However, a year later, the innovative activities proposed, co-developed, and put into practice were no...

Sport coaching researchers have provided generous recommendations on the importance of developing coach education programs based on learner-centered teaching (LCT) principles. However, empirical studies are rare, and without concrete examples, administrators and instructors will be reluctant to adopt this approach. In this case study, we used Weime...

While the impact of coaches on their athletes has been appreciated for more than a century, only recently have researchers reached a consensus concerning the key coaching principles and methods that consistently ensure the most positive outcomes for athletes and coaches. Sport Coaches’ Handbook presents this more holistic approach to coaching and p...

Although high-performance (HP) coaches’ learning journeys are idiosyncratic and winding, most of these coaches share the characteristic of having rich experiences as athletes. Studies on the career transition of HP athletes to sports coaches reveal a sharp disagreement between these incoming coaches with their practice field experience and national...

The sport coaching literature on coaching athletes with disabilities is relatively nascent but researchers are becoming increasingly interested in the domain (e.g., Cregan, Bloom, & Reid. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 78(4):339–350, 2007; Culver & Werthner. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health 10(2):167–175, 2017; McMaster...

In this chapter, we start by presenting some of the arguments supporting the paradigm shift from the traditional “instructor-centered teaching approach” (ICT; direct teaching) to the “learner-centered teaching approach” (LCT; active learning) that higher education institutions should make. Second, based on the work developed by some key authors of...

Multiple actors and roles are now recognized and promoted to support the development of coaches. Personal coaching is an emerging industry in many professional fields yet remains insignificant in sport coaching. The purpose of this study was to document and assess the value of a 12-month collaborative action research in which a high-performance rug...

Given the inextricable roles of the coach learner and coach educator in learner-centered (LC) coach education, research into their perceptions and experiences in these programs appears to be a priority. As such, building on Paquette and Trudel’s examination of Canada’s golf coach education program relative to its alignment with learner-centered app...

The Canadian National Coaching Certification Program (NCCP) redesigned its coaching education programmes to utilise a learner-centred, problem-based approach. The purpose of this paper is to document the design, delivery, and subjective assessment of this large-scale coach education programme through the perspectives of the different actors, with a...

Facing the increase in the number of publications, often spread across many journals, researchers have developed different approaches to review the literature. In the first part of this article we present the result of an “overview” type of review of literature on sport coach education programs in higher education (HE) between 2000–2018. By sharing...

For several years, sport coach education has meant the development of specific training programs and subsequent certifications. Given the phenomena of globalization and advances in technology, it is now easy to gain access to a vast amount of information that is constantly being updated. This has a significant impact on education in general, includ...

Previous research has suggested a shift from instructor-centred to learner-centred approaches in an attempt to improve coach education programs. To implement such crucial change it is essential to master the ‘new language’ and better understand educational contexts. The purposes of this article are to (a) highlight new social factors indicating an...

Despite a well-established understanding of the complexity inherent to both learning and sport coaching, programs designed to educate coaches have until recently been guided by pedagogical approaches aligned with rather simplistic views of learning. Thanks to the critical and innovative efforts of coaching scholars to uncover the shortcomings of tr...

Sport coaches struggle to integrate reflective practice. To reflect, coaches can choose from multiple tools: concept maps, reflective journals, or reflective cards (r-cards) to name a few. One persisting challenge is for coaches to allocate time to reflect. R-cards present an interesting avenue for coaches because they require little time. Nonethel...

The history of coach education in Western countries, much like higher education, has been shaped by societal influences and external drivers. The resulting trajectory includes a notable movement and shift in focus related to educational paradigms. Being learner-centered (LC) has become a central theme and mission by many coach education programs. T...

Globalization and advances in technology have created a context where knowledge changes and circulates faster than ever. In high-performance sport coaching, coaches increasingly move from country to country to join national teams – becoming ‘migrant coaches’. From a coach development perspective, it becomes relevant to investigate how coaches from...

Reflective practice has been examined for a long-time, yet coaches still struggle to implement reflective practice (Gallimore, Gilbert, and Nater, 2014). Publications showed or claimed that reflective practice is essential to a coach’s success (Gallimore et al., 2014; Irwin et al., 2004; Knowles et al., 2012; Knowles et al., 2014; Taylor et al., 20...

The three of us combine decades of experience in the sport coaching field, first as athletes who have been coached, then as coaches, coach educators, and coaching scientists. Increasingly we have been asked to act as consultants to guide sport organizations in the development of their coaches. In the high-performance coaching context, a shift from...

Password: 363868. In a world where changes are part of our daily life, the certification we receive aftercompleting a degree attests only to our competencies at a specific moment. To continue to develop and perform at our best, we must recognise that learning is much broader than education; it is a lifelong process in which each experience has the...

INTRODUCTION: Despite Canada being the first country to award equal opportunities for persons with a disability only 1% of Canadians with a disability compared to 30% of able-bodied Canadians are enrolled in sport organizations. The Canadian Sport Policy calls for barrier-free and relevant sport programming for “traditionally underrepresented and/...

In Brazil, contrary to the situation in many countries, sport coaching at all levels is considered a profession. Following a law passed by the government, those who want to coach are required to earn a university diploma called a ‘Bachelor in Physical Education’. This bachelor’s degree prepares future professionals to work in any of the following a...

Building on Hussain et al.’s (2012) analysis of Triathlon Canada’s constructivist-informed coach education program from the perspective of the program designer, this case study explored the structure and initial implementation of the program, as well as coaches’ perspectives of their journey to certification. Through a series of document analyses a...

Background: Research indicates that some youth sport coaches have specific strategies in their coaching plan to facilitate positive youth development (PYD) while others struggle in articulating how they promote the development of their athletes in actual practice. These variations can be largely attributed to the fact that coaching is a complex act...

A case study of a high school ice hockey program designed to teach players life skills and values was conducted to understand, from the perspective of administrators, coaches, parents, and players, the strengths and challenges of the program. Results indicated that the program’s strengths lied in its comprehensive approach to teaching life skills a...

In Canada, adolescent boys have been shown to have a higher high school dropout rate compared to girls. This situation is particularly evident in the country's second largest province by population, Quebec. The sport of Canadian football has recently gained in popularity in Quebec as many people believe that the sport can be used to promote both li...

There are few empirical studies that demonstrate how values are developed and how they are linked to coaching actions. There can be a discrepancy between the statement of coaches’ values and their actual coaching actions. In order to examine how coaching actions are influenced by values that are developed over a lifetime, the purpose of this articl...

Researchers have demonstrated the benefits of psychological skills training for athletes, but few studies have examined how coaches integrate such skills in their coaching practice. Empirical evidence indicates that the coaches have a preference to learn psychological skills in a user-friendly manner with consultant support. The purpose of the curr...

The research on coach learning and development deals with the classification of the sources from which coaches learn, and more recently, with the identification of learning being an idiosyncratic process in which there are variations in coaches’ learning paths. From a constructivist view, learning may be seen as a process of becoming: a person enga...

The PhD experience is often a transition from student to future faculty member, which involves considerable learning and development (Glaze, 2002; Hockey, 2004). Using a lifelong learning perspective ( Jarvis, 2009), the purpose of this article is to explore, through a reflective self-study, my process of learning throughout the PhD degree. In this...

Whether life skills are developed through sport greatly depends on how coaches create suitable environments that promote the development of youth (Gould & Carson, 2008). The purpose of this study was to examine, using Gould and Carson's (2008) model of coaching life skills, the philosophies and strategies used by model high school coaches to coach...

This study examines the implementation of Triathlon Canada's novel coach education program within the competition-development context from the perspective of the program designer; the High Performance Director (HPD). An interpretive approach was utilized to create a series of narratives to examine the background, perspectives and approaches used to...

Coaching for positive youth development (PYD) in the context of high school sport is a complex process given that many factors influence this environment. The purpose of this study was to explore the ability of high school coaches to facilitate PYD from the perspective of administrators, coaches, and athletes. Although stakeholders in general perce...

Although research has shown that youth can learn life skills and values through sport, and a multitude of scholars assert that sport is a context that should promote the development of life skills and values, little research has investigated the collective expectations and experiences of youth sport stakeholders. This research was designed to exami...

It is believed that adopting a constructivist approach to developing and implementing a coach education training program will be a challenging task in large-scale coach education programs when we consider the number of people to re-group, train, and evaluate. A research program was initiated to analyse the design and implementation of a revised lar...

Using Jarvis' (2006) psychosocial perspective of human learning, we explore how the career choices and the subsequent coaching approaches of five Canadian women coaches have been influenced by their primary and secondary socialization. A content analysis was performed to identify how coaches learned in their primary socialization with their family,...

Coaches are arguably the most important actors in the youth sport context and play an influential role in facilitating or hindering the development of youth. Despite the great impact they can have on youth development, most coaches have limited training or knowledge on how to structure suitable environments to facilitate youth development. Over the...

Chaque année, un grand nombre de canadiens se portent volontaires pour assumer le rôle d'entraîneur dans le contexte du sport scolaire lequel, dit-on, devrait être une extension de la salle de classe. La présente étude fut conduite dans le but d'établir le profil des entraîneurs d'une école secondaire et d'investiguer leur philosophie et stratégies...

The purpose of this study was to examine the sporting environment and coaching behaviours preferred by Canadian high school athletes. Thirty athletes (23 boys, 7 girls) between the ages of 13 and 18 years (M=16.2; SD=1.45) participated in individual semi-structured interviews lasting between 19 and 39 minutes (M=28). Participants were asked to desc...

The National Coaching Certification Program (NCCP) in Canada, and its sport specific partner in alpine ski racing, the Canadian Ski Coaches Federation (CSCF), are both in the process of re-designing their coach education training programs to become more congruent with a lifelong learning perspective. In this article, the authors explore (a) how the...

Youth sport literature indicates that those who are eliminated from sport teams following unsuccessful tryouts are more likely to experience negative consequences that those chosen for membership. Research on the communication of non-selection demonstrates that coaches struggle with the task of informing youth of their elimination despite having nu...

Background: Results from empirical research on character development in sport remain mixed concerning the outcomes of sport participation, in part because character is a socially constructed concept that can be interpreted in a wide variety of manners. Furthermore, the majority of research in this field has been conducted employing quantitative met...

Although there are a number of studies that have examined youth development in organised activities, few have been conducted in sport‐specific contexts. The purpose of this study was to document parents' perspectives on the practice of high school sport in a Canadian context. A qualitative methodology was employed and 20 parents who had at least on...

Researchers have investigated how coaches, from the recreational to the elite level of coaching, learn to coach. Many different learning situations have been identified in the research, yet the question remains: How is it that one coach's learning path emphasizes certain learning situations as key, and yet another coach's learning path emphasizes q...

This case study examines a sport leader's attempt to foster a coaches' community of practice in a competitive youth baseball league. It is analysed using Wenger's [8] community of practice framework. Interviews were conducted with seven participants including the sport leader (technical director), the league manager, and five coaches. The retrospec...

The training of coaches is considered central to sustaining and improving the quality of sports coaching and the ongoing process of professionalisation. Sports coaches participate in a range of learning opportunities (informal to formal) that contribute to their development to varying degrees. In this article, we present our collective understandin...

Research on intervention in the sporting context should benefit practitioners who could use the information to justify their actions on the field. An analysis of the English-speaking literature has been conducted (Gilbert & Trudel, 2004); however, such an analysis has not been conducted for the literature in French. We have identified research pape...

There is a widespread belief that sport can be used as a tool to promote life skills and positive youth development. However, little research has examined athletes’ perspectives on the development of life skills in school‐based sport programmes, in which a vast amount of youth are involved. In addition, research has yet to examine how youth experie...

Mission statements are widely employed as a tool for strategic organizational planning. In sport, various types of organizations utilize their mission statements to communicate objectives that range from the development of responsible citizens to the importance of establishing professional standards of ethical practice for members. Research has sho...

Repeated calls have been made by prominent sport and education associations for the creation of ongoing professional development networks and learning communities for youth sport coaches. The purpose of this paper is to propose a learning community approach to coach development that complements large-scale coach education programs. This concept pap...

In an attempt to describe learning outside of the usual official curriculum, concepts such as workplace learning, nonformal learning, informal learning, and incidental learning have been used in the fields of teacher education, workplace pedagogy, and sport. These 'outside-of-the-classroom' learning opportunities are characterized by the important...

Research has shown that coaches can play an integral role in the positive development of youth and that school sport might be a well-suited context to promote youth development. Considering that the personal characteristics and prior experiences of coaches might influence the attitudes and behaviors they bring to their coaching practice, interviews...

Background: Large-scale coach education programs have been developed in many countries around the world to help prepare coaches for their important role. Coaches have said that they also learn to coach from experience, starting from when they were young athletes until their current coaching positions. Finally, in the last decade, Internet resources...

Researchers have investigated how elite or expert coaches learn to coach, but very few have investigated this process with coaches at the recreational or developmental-performance levels. Thirty-six youth-sport coaches (ice hockey, soccer, and baseball) were each interviewed twice to document their learning situations. Results indicate that (a) for...

The purpose of this paper is to present, using Moon's (1999, 2004) generic view of learning, a new theoretical perspective in order to understand how coaches learn to coach. After presenting her main concepts, a case study of an elite Canadian coach is used to illustrate the different learning processes in three types of learning situations: mediat...

Le but de la présente étude était de mieux comprendre l'expérience des enseignants d'éducation physique impliqués dans la mise en place du nouveau programme cadre " éducation physique et santé ", depuis son lancement en septembre 1999. Le modèle de compréhension pour l'amélioration de la classe et de l'école développé par Fullan, Bennett, et Rolhei...

The study followed a four-phase design. In Phase I an exhaustive search was conducted for all English language coaching research published in journals from 1970 to 2001. In Phase II, copies of the research were obtained. An expert panel conducted a manual search and a review in Phase III to address validity. Analysis of the research was completed i...

Similar to a belief system, a role frame acts as a perceptual filter that influences how practitioners define their professional responsibilities (Schön, 1983). The purpose of this article is to present the role frame components of model youth team sport coaches. The results are based on a two-year multiple-case study with six coaches. On average,...

Studies on moral education in sport suggest that a sport like ice hockey which is a competitive male contact sport is an excellent context to study values and moral education. Using an ethnography approach, the researcher followed the activities of a Bantam (14-15 years) AA team during an entire season. Among the data collected are interviews with...

Literature on youth ice hockey indicates that there is a need for changes so children can play a safer game in a more fair-play environment. Throughout this paper we argue that with the existing training programs for coaches and the others involved in youth ice hockey it will be difficult to move in that direction. The adoption of values like integ...

Part of the on-going dialogue on qualitative research in sport and exercise psychology, this review portrays the qualitative articles published in three sport psychology journals and examines how qualitative research can deepen our knowledge in applied sport psychology. Eighty-four of the 485 research ar-ticles published in these journals used a qu...

The present study examined how model youth sport coaches learn to coach through experience. Yin's multiple-case study approach was used with six youth team sport coaches. Data were collected over an entire sport season through a series of semi-structured interviews, observations, and documents. All six case study coaches developed and refined coach...

The purpose of the present study was to provide a profile of rule infractions at the Bantam (14-15 years old) level of ice hockey. For each penalty, information is provided on the: (a) category and type, (b) period of the game, (c) number of players penalized, and (d) zone and area on the ice surface where the infraction occurred. Gamesheet reports...

The purpose of this study was to examine the views of youth ice hockey coaches (n = 12) when asked to discuss their game behaviours related to (a) rule infractions, (b) aggressive play, and (c) injuries. A total of 48 stimulated recall interview transcripts were analyzed. Results show that (a) rule infractions, aggressive play, and injuries became...

Numerous studies and reports have shown that ice hockey at the minor league level is often too violent and that modifications are required in how players behave during games (penalties taken) and in their use of body checking. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of an intervention strategy on three dependent variables: the frequen...

A case study design was used to (a) describe the process and identify the content of the verbal interactions between an eminent mental training consultant and five elite level athletes during ten sessions, and to (b) compare the analyzed sessions with the consultant's published approach on mental training. The sources of information included the au...

This study provided a descriptive analysis of the interactive decision making factors considered by coaches of youth ice hockey (aged 10-15 years) during games. Using a multiple-case study design, data were collected using a combination of semi structured interviews and an adapted version of stimulated recall interviews. An inductive analysis of th...

Résumé Les travaux de recherche en pédagogie de l'entraînement sportif ont surtout porté sur l'analyse des comportements des entraîneurs et des athlètes. À l'opposé, l'étude du domaine cognitif est peu développée même si plusieurs auteurs reconnaissent que le milieu sportif est un contexte qui s'y prête très bien. Le but de cette étude1 était de me...

Used an expert system approach to identify and conceptualize the knowledge of 17 Canadian expert high-performance gymnastic coaches. The knowledge elicitation process consisted of open-ended questions and various questioning methods to unveil, explore, and prove important information about coaching. Data were analyzed following the procedures of gr...

In the last few years, studies in sport pedagogy have supplied data on the learning conditions provided to young athletes during training sessions and games. From the results of these studies, we learned that, in general, the coach spends most of his/her time observing and organizing rather than teaching. Results also show that the motor engaged ti...