SPORTS COACHING INDUSTRY

Sports Coaching Industry

Sports Coaching Industry

Introduction

"The Indian Cricket Saga" - identifies the crossfire between the current Indian cricket coach Greg Chappell and former captain Sourav Ganguly, which erupted during the Indian team's Zimbabwe tour in June 2005. With the essential focus on team performance, the case probes into factors like; locus of power, shifting team dynamics, emotional intelligence, adversity quotient, effect of the environmental through various stake-holders, etc. It emphasizes the interdependence of all these factors and their influence on team performance. The basic idea is to draw parallels from the sports arena to explain team performance in organizations.

Sports coaching mainly relates to instruction, improvements, and innovations applied to the sporting or athletic context. This may include individual, team, and other types of sporting situations. This type of coaching's core notion is that of striving to achieve best in particular sporting field. The ethos embedded in sports coaching has translated effectively to the business or organizational context where attempts to improve productivity and results are often under consideration. (Horn,, 2002, 181)The sports coach focuses on matters relating to improvement of physical or mental performance in enhancing results achieved and as such is highly focused on goal-specific areas.

As sports relates to achievement of goals, it is analogous to organization in terms of desired excellence and application of methodologies to produce higher levels of performance and productivity. Sporting is an easily accepted metaphor for need for results in the business or organizational context but is highly differentiated from organizational context in the number of crucial ways. Organizations are not guided by clearly defined rules, timed processes, audience participation, and other elements as found in sporting arena. All same, organizations are similar to the sporting situation in the more general sense in terms of competition and team environments and resultsoriented activities. Sports are seen as the healthy national activity and are readily accepted into metaphoric landscape of organization or business realm where they serve as the powerful emblematic tool.(Standage, 2006, 100)

In essence, coaching is a broad term and could be considered a style of facilitation that is found within many areas of life. The common thread that most coaching processes have is that they derive their impetus from notions around motivation, goal setting, performance, and productivity.

Coaching is a multidisciplinary undertaking drawing from a broad body of knowledge in psychology and the behavioral sciences, education, business, sports, and many other fields. Coaching is about the alignment of actions, thoughts, and motivations toward a desired outcome or process. At times, coaching is not about a means to an end, but about the improvement of a process toward a desired outcome. This process could be considered developmental and is often associated with actualization or learning for individuals, teams, and organizations.

he skills or characteristics generally associated with being an effective coach include the ability to inspire and motivate, the use of excellent communication skills with a positive regard for other people and their motivations, and sometimes an expert knowledge of the relevant field associated with the coachee/client's ...