Sports coaching as pedagogy: a humanist approach

This paper responds to a long-standing call to understand sports coaching as pedagogy. Against current reductionist and posthumanist tendencies, I argue that coaching should be reconceived as a fundamentally human and pedagogical activity. I develop a philosophical foundation for a humanist approach by drawing on Thomas Fuchs’s humanism of embodiment, a humanist theory of sport, and an embodied conception of Bildung. This is integrated with Klaus Prange’s theory of operative pedagogy, which identifies showing as the basic pedagogical operation that brings the coach, participant, and sporting matter into meaningful relation. From this humanist and pedagogical stance, coaching emerges as a normative, craft‑based, world‑centred and affirmative practice marked by uncertainty and risk. By elucidating its essential elements, basic forms and distinguishing features, I seek to articulate a pedagogical core of sports coaching that can sustain sport as a meaningful, ethical, and educative human engagement.