Coaching experience: Examining its role in coaches’ decision making

Abstract

Abstract Although the decision‐making component of coaching expertise is widely recognized, empirical research on coaches’ decision making is still scant. In this paper, we attempted to expand the knowledge base by examining the relationship between coaches’ decision making and experience through a secondary analysis of empirical data from a telephone survey of gymnastics coaches. In a mixed methods design, 64 coaches provided numerical and verbal responses to hypothetical scenarios about an injured athlete's participation in competition. Results were analyzed by level of experience (1–5, 6–10, and 10+ years of experience). The findings indicated differences in both the amount and nature of information attended to by coaches with differing levels of experience—generally corroborating the cognitive novice‐expert literature while simultaneously providing an illustration of the way in which expertise‐related increases in cognitive complexity are expressed in coaches’ decision making about a specific coaching problem