Football-as-war, coach-as-general: analogy, metaphor and management implications

Sporting terms have been used as metaphor and analogy to describe and prescribe life experiences. It has been suggested that the use of sport terminology can assist in the general understanding of complex terms and situations, however, the use of sport as metaphor and analogy for many aspects of social understanding can have negative consequences. The analogy of sport and war seems to be particularly prevalent within football, irrespective of the code or culture in which it is played. This article demonstrates the popular understanding of Australian Rules ‘football as war’ through two complementary studies. The first study investigates the representation of Australian Rules football as war, specifically through the analysis of both images and text on the front covers of the sport ‘lift-out’ sections of two prominent Melbourne newspapers, The Herald Sun and The Age. The second study examines whether people interpret non-war-like images of Australian Rules football in war-like terms. Forty-five undergraduate sport marketing and management students were asked to write about one of four different images of football players and coaches interacting, which revealed that football is understood as war. Further, when prompted by an image of football players and coaches interacting, people in this study interpreted the interactions as consistently war-like. Coaches were portrayed as militaristic generals and the athletes as soldiers. Implications for management, education and practice are discussed.

Patient engagement and coaching for health: the PEACH study- a cluster randomised controlled trial using the telephone to coach people with type 2 diabetes to engage with their GPs to improve diabetes care: a study protocol.

Background
The PEACH study is based on an innovative 'telephone coaching' program that has been used effectively in a post cardiac event trial. This intervention will be tested in a General Practice setting in a pragmatic trial using existing Practice Nurses (PN) as coaches for people with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Actual clinical care often fails to achieve standards, that are based on evidence that self-management interventions (educational and psychological) and intensive pharmacotherapy improve diabetes control. Telephone coaching in our study focuses on both. This paper describes our study protocol, which aims to test whether goal focused telephone coaching in T2D can improve diabetes control and reduce the treatment gap between guideline based standards and actual clinical practice.
Methods/design
In a cluster randomised controlled trial, general practices employing Practice Nurses (PNs) are randomly allocated to an intervention or control group. We aim to recruit 546 patients with poorly controlled T2D (HbA1c >7.5%) from 42 General Practices that employ PNs in Melbourne, Australia. PNs from General Practices allocated to the intervention group will be trained in diabetes telephone coaching focusing on biochemical targets addressing both patient self-management and engaging patients to work with their General Practitioners (GPs) to intensify pharmacological treatment according to the study clinical protocol. Patients of intervention group practices will receive 8 telephone coaching sessions and one face-to-face coaching session from existing PNs over 18 months plus usual care and outcomes will be compared to the control group, who will only receive only usual care from their GPs. The primary outcome is HbA1c levels and secondary outcomes include cardiovascular disease risk factors, behavioral risk factors and process of care measures.
Discussion
Understanding how to achieve comprehensive treatment of T2D in a General Practice setting is the focus of the PEACH study. This study explores the potential role for PNs to help reduce the treatment and outcomes gap in people with T2D by using telephone coaching. The intervention, if found to be effective, has potential to be sustained and embedded within real world General Practice.

The dynamic role of elite coach : player and coach perspectives

As part of a larger study on talent development, ten top ranked players and ten coaches (nominated by the player) responded to open-ended questionnaires. Players and coaches were asked them to recall their background in tennis, describe the role of the coach and any changes in this role, and offer suggestions to coaches for nurturing talent. A series of inductive content analyses was conduct to analyze the data. These analyses revealed significant, and changing, roles of the coach during a player’s development to professional status. Recommendations to coaches highlighted the importance of coach philosophy, communication, and planning. Implications for coach education programs are discussed.

Ensuring implementation success : how should coach injury prevention education be improved if we want coaches to deliver safety programmes during training sessions?

Coaches play a major role in encouraging and ensuring that participants of their teams adopt appropriate safety practices. However, the extent to which the coaches undertake this role will depend upon their attitudes about injury prevention, their perceptions of what the other coaches usually do and their own beliefs about how much control they have in delivering such programmes. Fifty-one junior netball coaches were surveyed about incorporating the teaching of correct (safe) landing technique during their delivery of training sessions to junior players. Overall, >94% of coaches had strongly positive attitudes towards teaching correct landing technique and >80% had strongly positive perceptions of their own control over delivering such programmes. Coaches’ ratings of social norms relating to what others think about teaching safe landing were more positive (>94%) than those relating to what others actually do (63–74%). In conclusion, the junior coaches were generally receptive towards delivering safe landing training programmes in the training sessions they led. Future coach education could include role modelling by prominent coaches so that more community-level coaches are aware that this is a behaviour that many coaches can, and do, engage in.

Coach career development: Who is responsible?

Career development is crucial to the success of individuals, organizations and industries. As such, in many professions there are prescribed career development processes underpinned by legal and institutional policies that drive managerial practice. Although there has been sustained interest in understanding career development for athletes and building managerial strategies to assist in the process, there is little empirical knowledge about career development of coaches, and how management may assist in the process. The aim of this study is to explore the way in which sport policy discourse and agendas have impacted coach career development. This study demonstrates that coaches’ careers are not part of the policy discourse despite their important role in athlete performance, career development and sport organization development and success. Coaches are the key performance managers in sport and yet they are ignored by sport policy makers and managers when considering the development of the Australian sport workforce.

The immediate impact of coach succession events on season ticket holder attitudes

This study is the first to examine the immediate impact that succession events (e.g., removal and hiring) involving head coaches have on season ticket holder (STH) attitudes like satisfaction and renewal intentions. Grounded within a customer equity framework, large-scale survey data from cases of two professional sport teams is presented showing STH attitudes directly before and after major succession events. The data shows that appointing a new coach was met with increases in positive attitudes toward almost every aspect of the STH experience, where the case of removing a coach had no meaningful impact on attitudes. The findings of these cases reaffirm the view that coach succession is a multiple-phase process including distinct stages of removal and replacement. While it is the desire for improved on-field performance that often motivates coach succession, our findings suggest the impact of succession activities on fans is more wide ranging, with significant implications for marketers who manage fan relationships. In guiding the management of a team's fans, coach removal alone should not be relied upon to change attitudes or intentions toward a club. Appointing new leaders completes the cycle, increasing positive STH attitudes and, most importantly, giving an immediate lift to renewal likelihood.

Costs and advance directives at the end of life: a case of the ‘Coaching Older Adults and Carers to have their preferences Heard (COACH)’ trial

BACKGROUND: Total costs associated with care for older people nearing the end of life and the cost variations related with end of life care decisions are not well documented in the literature. Healthcare utilisation and associated health care costs for a group of older Australians who entered Transition Care following an acute hospital admission were calculated. Costs were differentiated according to a number of health care decisions and outcomes including advance directives (ADs).

METHODS: Study participants were drawn from the Coaching Older Adults and Carers to have their preferences Heard (COACH) trial funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. Data collected included total health care costs, the type of (and when) ADs were completed and the place of death. Two-step endogenous treatment-regression models were employed to test the relationship between costs and a number of variables including completion of ADs.

RESULTS: The trial recruited 230 older adults with mean age 84 years. At the end of the trial, 53 had died and 80 had completed ADs. Total healthcare costs were higher for younger participants and those who had died. No statistically significant association was found between costs and completion of ADs.

CONCLUSION: For our frail study population, the completion of ADs did not have an effect on health care utilisation and costs. Further research is needed to substantiate these findings in larger and more diverse clinical cohorts of older people.

Japanese lesson study : a numeracy coach's view

This paper reports findings based on interview data from a professional teacher educator who was a Numeracy Coach for a group of schools that participated in a research project, Implementing structured problem-solving mathematics lessons through Lesson Study. The Numeracy Coach was a highly-skilled professional teacher educator, whose position was such that she was both a support person to the teachers and a participant in the project. Her insights into the processes and effects of Japanese Lesson Study, on teachers, as well as herself, are extremely enlightening, and form the data for this paper. While the evidence is from a single source, the evidence is consistent with other projects into the effectiveness of the Japanese model of Lesson Study. Aspects of the project with implications for teacher professional development are detailed.