An Inquiry into Athletic Coaches’ Knowledge: Revealing the Structure of Experiential Knowledge

Abstract

Knowledge of athletic coaching has always been regarded as an important approach toward improving athletes’ performances. In the sports and exercise sciences circle, the channels of athletic knowledge research are generally divided into scientific and human social aspects. In recent years, scientific research studies on sports and exercise has put more emphasis on athletic performances, thus enhancing the reliance on scientific results and disvalued trainers’ experiences accordingly. However, sports and exercise are science of practice and application, the existence of trainers’ experiences should be respected and not to be replaced. Therefore, phenomenology established by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was applied in this research to go deep into athletic coaches’ experiences and explore their essential knowledge. The results shows that there are generally two sets of knowledge in the natural mindsets of trainers, which are fixed scientific knowledge structure and experiential human body diagram. After restoring, digging and exploring the essence through phenomenology, scientific knowledge is found to have the characteristics of control, consistency, unification, and order, whereas the features of body diagram are imagination, realization, mix and mingle, and conviction. In order to clarify the existing conditions of coaches’ experiential knowledge, a second essence restoring was made attempting to return to the forming stage of coaches’ knowledge. The results show the coaches’ experiential knowledge is integral, long-lasting, and consistent, and works smoothly in the sports fields.

Keywords

• athletic coach
• experiential knowledge
• phenomenology