Athletic Coaching: A Communication Perspective

Each year, millions of youth athletes participate in organized sport under the guidance of a coach, who is entrusted with overseeing their development and performance, as well as providing a safe environment. A communicative approach to coaching recognizes that the skills, lessons, values, and experiences that athletes gain are determined by how coaches interact with athletes and structure their sporting environments. Athletic Coaching: A Communication Perspective provides a foundation for a communicative perspective of coaching in an effort to better understand and promote coach effectiveness. As part of this effort, this book conceptualizes coaching as a communicative endeavor, provides a framework from which to understand coaching effectiveness, and explicates four common perspectives (i.e., instructional, organizational, group, and interpersonal) utilized by communication scholars to examine coaching. Moreover, this book forwards a scholarly agenda for building a holistic framework of coaching and increasing the applied value of coach communication scholarship via methodological and theoretical considerations. Athletic Coaching is of benefit to many audiences, including communication students and scholars who are developing their understanding of coaching literature, interdisciplinary scholars who seek a representation of a communicative perspective of coaching, and coaches who may use this text as a self-reflective tool for pedagogical refinement.

Gregory A. Cranmer (PhD, West Virginia University, 2015) is Assistant Professor of Sport Communication at Clemson University and a fellow of the Robert H. Brooks Sports Science Institute. His research focuses on optimizing the function of task-oriented groups, principally sports teams, via highlighting the underlying social dynamics that facilitate group performance and member experience. His efforts center around aiding (a) social exchanges and distributions of interpersonal and organizational resources (e.g., social support, information, or influence), (b) individuals’ integration into novel tasks, roles, and groups (i.e., socialization), and (c) the development of members through leadership and communicative strategies. His contributions to the subdiscipline of sport communication are evident in the reception of multiple early career awards from the National and International Communication Association and numerous publications within outlets such as Communication & Sport, International Journal of Sport Communication, Communication Studies, Communication Quarterly, Western Journal of Communication, Communication Research Reports, and the forthcoming Handbook of Communication and Sport.