Para Sport: Environments for Sparking Creative Developments in Coaching Practice
摘要
When coaches coach how they were coached, adherence to traditional methodologies is sticky. With practice based around developing ideal movement models through drills that ‘simplify’ the skill, many coaches’ interactions with athletes focus on prescriptive instructions and error correction. This kind of coaching is a linear process that follows an almost formulaic progression. In contrast, a contemporary view of coaching considers coaches are architects or environment designers and the environments created shape what the performers learn. A key challenge for coach developers is how to shift ‘traditional’ coaches’ thinking of practice to embrace these ‘new’ ideas. In this chapter, we argue that Paralympic sport provide rich environments for coaching innovation and can provide the constraints to promote creativity. Working with Para sport and Para athletes challenges current thinking and forces a shift from focusing on the individual to embracing the individual-environment mutuality. When long-term, ‘successful’ methodologies no longer work, it sparks new ideas that can enhance coaching per se, not just in Para coaching. We demonstrate that being required to design and iterate learning tasks to suit individual athletes has a significant impact on learning for coaches and results in coaches who are renowned for their creativity (Patatas et al., 2018).