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Description
Coaching is a human activity that delivers accumulated knowledge and skills of particular sports. This paper explores the processes in which elite migrant coaches transfer their knowledge and practices after their international relocation to different socio-cultural settings. Special attention is given to the international mobility of South Korean elite coaches who were originally used to ‘productive but oppressive’ styles of coaching in their home country and later moved to more liberalised sporting environments of the West, in order to examine the potentially double-edged nature of elite coach migration: knowledge exchange (e.g., Williams, 2007) or risk transmission (e.g., Chang et al., 2017). Drawing mainly from in-depth interviews with five South Korean elite coaches who have worked or are working for national teams of four Western countries (the UK, the US, France and Ireland), the analysis reveals cases where the effective but abusive Korean coaching approaches were encouraged or constrained by the hosting National Sport Governing Bodies (NGBs) in the receiving countries. The findings suggest that the extent to which migrant coaching practices were accepted within the local contexts was dependent on the interests of NGBs – the organisational priority and desire to dominate in the global sporting arms race. The paper concludes by providing implications for future sociological inquiries not only into coach migration as a contested arena where different values are conflicted and negotiated, but also into abuse in elite sport at organisational levels.
