Mitchell Hewitt

Tennis Coaching: Applying the Game Sense Approach

This article demonstrates the game sense approach for teaching tennis to novice players. In a game sense approach, learning is positioned within modified games to emphasize the way rules shape game behavior, tactical awareness, decision-making and the development of contextualized stroke mechanics.

Investigating the teaching styles of tenniscoaches using The Spectrum

Abstract It is unknown what teaching styles (range of pedagogies) coaches are employing during coaching sessions and whether these teaching styles are associated with recommended pedagogical principles advocated by sport and coaching scholars. It is unknown whether twenty years of coach education has shifted coaching practice as the insights into the pedagogical diversity and preference of teaching styles that underpin and inform the coaches’ decisions to employ particular teaching strategies during coaching sessions are undetermined. This paper addresses these unknowns in the field of tennis coaching in Australia by reporting the findings of a study that address the lack of information on the teaching styles employed by tennis coaches by asking the following research question: What teaching styles are junior coaches in Australia actually using during coaching sessions? This study used The Spectrum (Mosston & Ashworth, 2008) of teaching styles as a tool to assess the observed teaching styles of twelve junior coaches. Contrary to the educational convictions of Australian sport coach education materials the results from this study indicated that the coaches in this study potentially did not offer players developmental opportunities beyond a limited range (i.e., motor skill development in the physical learning domain) due to a narrow pedagogical mix in their coaching.

Self-identified teaching styles of junior development and club professional tennis coaches in Australia

Coaches are fundamental to providing sporting experiences. Each year, numerous coaching practitioners from around the world offer players of all ages and abilities assistance and direction that serve to fulfil their sporting requirements and goals. According to Lyle and Cushion (2010), alongside professions such as ‘teaching and medicine, coaching is one of the most ubiquitous services across the globe’ (p. 1). As a consequence, there has been a significant expansion of coaching research (Gilbert & Trudel, 2004) that has positioned the discipline of coaching as a valid academic field of study (Lyle, 2002). In spite of this escalation of research, coaching remains a vaguely defined and under-researched field of endeavour (Lyle & Cushion, 2010). Notwithstanding lengthy investigations from numerous empirical and theoretical viewpoints (Gilbert & Trudel, 2004), much remains unknown with regard to coaching and instructional processes, whether positive or negative, across a range of settings and sports (Cushion, Armour, & Jones, 2006; Lyle, 2002; Potrac, Jones, & Cushion, 2007).