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By employing an attentive, inquisitive, and open style, coaches are to develop their ability to find out the athletes’ needs and ways of thinking. This is a matter of discovering each athlete’s specific circumstances, experiences, emotions, and personality. When the coach sees the world from the athlete’s standpoint, her basis for choosing the suitable approaches and methods will be changed. What happens when care is linked to discussions on elite sport and coaching, and when it is linked to educational strategies and concepts? And how would the incorporation of care practices in coaching influence the percentage of female coaches at the elite level?
The empirical material for this article stems from a mentoring programme for aspiring coaches held under the auspices of Olympiatoppen, Norway’s elite sport development organization. In total, 11 mentors and eight coaches, both male and female, were interviewed.
We believe there is a risk of relational coaches being assigned the role as the new ‘priesthood’ who guide and oversee their athletes’ lives down to the minutest detail. Specifically, this entails that the coach establishes a relationship to the athlete that leads her to open the door into all aspects of her life – her pains, problems, desires, and dreams – and where the aim is still to use this knowledge to improve the coaching and hence the performance. This represents an administrative form that exploits the characteristics of what Foucault called “pastoral power”.
