Overall, this study has shed light on how elite golf coaches make, and to a greater extent, deliver their intentions for impact in coaching sessions. Indeed, while much of the PJDM literature (Martindale & Collins, 2005; 2007; 2013) has focused on how decisions are made, this chapter placed greater emphasis on how decisions (i.e., intentions for impact) are effectively delivered in the specific context of golf (as established in Chapter 3). Indeed, the majority of the key themes that emerged throughout this study, specifically chronic effects (i.e., coherent expectations, coherent conversations), acute effects (intellectual insight, kinaesthetic insight) and regulatory effects (disrupting the moment, encouraging the moment), largely served as a tool to help the coach ‘land’ their intentions. Of course, the structure of how decisions are formed is critical for making coherent and consistent decisions leading towards a longer-term objective, but just as important, is the ability to deliver and execute the coach’s intentions. In other words, these effects, plus athlete’s area of focus towards the coach’s intentions for impact (as consistent with the player’s goals) throughout the entire coaching session. In sum, this study has addressed the idea that good decisions are not enough in golf coaching; you also need to be good at landing them!
However, whilst this study has shed light on how coaches make and, just as importantly, deliver their intentions for impact, it is unknown how the findings might relate to elite coaching in tournament contexts. Given that my personal area of interest lies with coaching at the highest level, specifically professional golfers competing on tour, I decided that my next step should be to consider how the ‘home based coaching’ effects described in this study might be transferred to tournament conditions. Therefore, the following chapter distinguishes in some detail how home- based coaching differs to tournament contexts.
Chapter 5:
Elite Tournament Support: Outlining The Challenge and What This Means for the Coach
5.1 Introduction
As stated in Chapter 2, golf coach literature has predominantly placed attention towards performers and the study and application of principles from fields such as biomechanics, psychology and physiology. Few studies have considered facets in the coaching process, including golf coach PJDM. As a result, Chapter 3 was designed to explore the broad context of golf coaches’ PJDM and provide a base on which to explore the specific skills used by a specific subset of golf coaches in Chapter 4. From this first study in Chapter 3, the take home points related to the sliding scale from tour level coaches to club level, with coaches operating at higher levels of performance appearing to have: (a) a more considered approach when identifying their golfer’s performance issue (albeit this still seemed to take place over a relatively short time period); (b) a consideration of more performance areas when assessing the golfer’s presenting issues; (c) a greater preference to work towards longer time framed goals; and (d) a greater preference to gauge their effectiveness on the player’s progress towards the attainment of longer term goals. However, it was also clear that these approaches and preferences were significantly shaped and limited by players’ power over the precise direction and nature of interventions (i.e. what and how something should be worked on). In sum, these findings pointed to a situation in which the delivery of structured coaching appears somewhat restricted or at least difficult to deliver. More specifically, it was discovered that, to deliver coherent and consistent support over longer periods of time, golf coaches must have the ability to: (a) recognise and manage their players’ short termism; (b)
recognise and manage their players’ power; and (c) continually frame work against the players’ long-term objectives to sell their coaching messages.
Reflecting on the results from Chapter 3, the purpose of Chapter 4 was to examine the ways in which elite level golf coaches manage these challenges to consistently deliver session intentions that are nested within medium and long-term agendas. In other words, how do coaches get their pre-planned intentions for impact to continually ‘land’ with their players? From the results, it was found that maintaining work on long-term intentions required the coach, within a coaching session, to deliver chronic, acute and regulatory effects. Chronic effects included coherent plans, coherent expectations and coherent conversations; all of which served to provide a ‘lower intensity’ reminder or frame of what the coach and player were trying to achieve in the long-term. In contrast, acute effects were actions delivered by the coach that provided golfers with a sharper, ‘higher impact’ reminder or frame of what they were trying to achieve in the long-term. Specifically, the mechanisms of intellectual
insight and kinaesthetic insight were used to help the golfer to channel their focus and energy
towards accomplishing the session intention and so further negate the potential for disruption from a player’s short-termism and relative power in the relationship. Beyond these chronic and acute effects, coaches also used mechanisms to help manage players’ emotions in a way that increased the likelihood of achieving the session intention; i.e., mechanisms that helped the chronic and acute effects to best ‘land’ with the player. Namely, disrupting the moment and encouraging the moment were the two key themes identified in this instance. Finally, this study also found that coaches used time and space to increase the likelihood that their decisions within the session (i.e., on when, where, and how to deliver a chronic, acute or regulatory effect) were adapted to align with the unfolding situation (e.g. a player struggling with a certain activity). In this way, coaches used time and space to optimise the fit between
their naturalistic decisions (i.e. those made in the session) and their long-term intentions for impact (i.e. those made before the session through classical decision making processes).
Despite Chapter 4 highlighting some useful principles that were used to deliver a coach’s PJDM within effective ‘home base’ coaching, the relevance of these mechanisms to tournament level support is unclear. Indeed, this is largely due to the different and added demands that tournament level golf brings which are not experienced at ‘home base’ coaching. As such, before exploring the extent to which the findings from Chapter 4 may also be applicable within a tournament support context, it is important to firstly consider what features of tournament coaching differ from home based coaching? More specifically, it is important to consider the tournament player, the tournament coach, the tournament format, and the tournament environment; all of which will logically impact on the way that coaches need to deliver their intentions for impact when providing support at a tournament.
As an important qualification, the following commentary on each of these features is based primarily on my own experiences and understanding as a golf coach. Indeed, with part of the rationale for completing the doctorate being to further enhance my own professional practice, consideration of my own experiences and thoughts on particular differences/challenges was appropriate. Additionally, this approach was supported by the lack of literature and training on the differences between tournaments and training contexts within golf. Despite this dearth of available literature and lack of training, my commentary is of course still limited in the sense that it is delivered from my own perspective. However, to counter this as much as possible, these judgements are grounded against previously published literature from other domains and, based on my community of practice, what I feel is the common reality of tournament coaching.