Professional Judgement and Decision Making in Sport Coaching: To Jump Or Not To Jump

Recently there has been increased interest in using Recognition Primed Decision Making (RPD) to examine and understand decision making of sport coaches in time-limited situations. Furthermore, there is also an expectation that Type 2 classical decision making (CDM) would be used within coaching since time is often available to make judgements and decisions. Finally, given the scientific underpinnings available to coaches we would expect greater use of formalistic rules rather than substantive heuristics through the application of RPD and/or CDM in coaching. However, despite these ideas relatively little is known about the actual decision making behaviour of coaches in practice. Against this premise 12 long jump coaches were asked to identify the strength and weaknesses of a long jump athlete and offer a view on how they would work with the athlete. All coaches were then asked to identify what they would do if their first approach didn’t work. Findings suggest that coaches have an initial wish to engage in RPD type behaviour but drawing mainly on substantive heuristics. Uncertainty pushed coaches to become more considered, and formalistic. In conclusion, coaches have the capacity to be ‘expert’ in their DM behaviour but may not use this capacity unless pushed to.

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