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ABSTRACTThis article introduces several concepts from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) through problematising the athlete as a heterogeneous entity that is multiply enacted. Through these concepts, we reject the notion that there is only a single underlying biological body as the essence of athletic performance. We instead argue that the athlete is enacted by a network, and that studies of coaching practice must therefore move beyond a restricted focus on the coach-athlete relationship or institutionalised arrangements within a sport. Understanding the athlete as a network reveals the way practices can be more aligned with athlete-centred coaching and adopt a more holistic approach. Through two examples of successful non-institutionalised, athlete-centred arrangements we illustrate how ANT can be used to gain insights into coaching practices that extend current Foucauldian analyses. We conclude that viewing the athlete as multiply enacted highlights differences that could serve as productive spaces for reimagining coaching practice.

ABSTRACTThere have been numerous calls by coaching researchers for Foucauldian-informed coach developers to help coaches change their practices to be less reliant on discipline’s techniques and instruments. In this paper, we explored what it might mean for a Foucauldian-informed coach developer to work collaboratively with a male university endurance running coach as he learned how to problematize the use of discipline. More specifically, we examined some of the barriers, challenges, and opportunities that the coach experienced as he attempted to learn, in collaboration with the first author, how to question the unintended consequences of discipline’s techniques and instruments and rethink the “total effects” of his coaching practices. The results revealed that the coach was able to show a degree of problematization, however, in the field the deep-rooted connection between endurance running, physiology, and discipline made coaching for him in a less disciplinary way a challenge. To conclude, Foucauldian-informed coach developers working in sports where physiology is the predominant sport science could use specific pedagogical strategies that work with and explicitly complicate the strong cyclical relationship between discipline and physiology to help coaches implement practices that are less dominated by, not absent of, physiology.