Abstract

This chapter tries to explain and illustrate how sport coaching mirrors the rest of human life in its need to properly combine objective, intersubjective and subjective ingredients. That is not to say that sport coaching (‘coaching’ from now) unfailingly combines these ingredients properly. It is to say that coaching, like human life in general, tends to flourish when it does and tends to falter when it does not. This chapter begins with an outline of Nagel’s graded conceptions of objectivity and subjectivity, which cast each as a matter of degree, and therefore open a conceptual space for intersubjectivity. The treatment then reflects upon the hope of a comprehensive objective idea of coaching, before illustrating objectivity in the topics of technique, strategy, sport psychology and morality. Coverage of the final of those involves illustrations from coaching ethicist Jeffrey Fry, reflection upon masculinity in the culture of sport, and reviews of behaviour and culture by Swim England and Sport England together with UK Sport. The treatment then moves onto intersubjective ‘models’ (or frameworks) of sport, their different normative pressures and their scope for immoral practice. The input of subjectivity is then covered in personal coaching philosophy, personal coach leanings, and the distinctive life that animates the coach.