|  | Feature: “Ethical Issues in Coaching” | No.58 January 2010 |
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The Ethics in Sports Coaching Alun R. Hardman and Carwyn R. Jones |
Introduction Academic literature focusing on the study of sport has long since recognised the position of the coach as one who is central to the transmission, proliferation and development of contemporary sporting practices. Indeed, in many ways, the pre-eminence of the role of the coach can be considered as a defining feature around which most, if not all, other characteristics which epitomise modern sport gravitate. This is certainly true at the elite level of sport, and increasingly so at all levels. It is rare to encounter sports practitioners who neither are, nor want to be ‘coached’ (even if this means self- or peer-coaching). To be coached, to ‘have’ a coach, is often taken as a defining feature of serious sport. Allen Guttman’s seminal analysis of the modern development of sport, for example identifies specialisation of roles, and in particular the introduction of the coach as the result of a “characteristically modern stress on achievement which leads in turn, liberates the athlete” (1978: 39). While much of contemporary competitive sports culture takes the coach as a given, at the same time, the player-sport-coach relationship is largely understood, rationalised and evaluated with the means and ends of performance enhancement in mind (Martens, 2004; Lynch, 2001; Sharkey and Gaskill, 2007). This achievement-orientated coaching ideology is principally informed by socio-psychological, physiological, biomechanical and pedagogical disciplinary knowledge (Burton and Raedeke, 2008; Burkett, 2010; Jowett and Lavallee, 2007) where the end value of competitive success often remains unquestioned. As a result, the dominant notion that prevails is the coach’s role is that of a ‘technician’ whose role is to identify, diagnose and cure performance problems. Coaching is dominated by the ‘performance principle’ (Loland, 2001) and coaching success and recognition flows to those who best achieve these largely unquestioned ends. Despite this dominant view of the coach as performance enhancer, the coaching process is also inherently a moral one involving social interaction with close and often intense relationships. As such, the coaching process has an inescapable ethical dimension which is often unexamined and neglected. The academic community have an obligation to critically explore coaching’s moral aspect, and, as is the case with all worthwhile philosophical investigations, the focus of this work should not be merely to describe the empirical and practical realities of what sports’ coaching “is”, but instead to establish what coaching from a moral point of view “ought” to be. To a large extent, an examination into the ethical dimension of sports coaching, though underdeveloped, can draw upon a substantial body of work already covering a broad range of socio-cultural issues in sport. In the main, however, such work has tended to focus primarily on the values and actions of sports participants, in short, the behaviours and actions of sportsmen and women have been the primary focus of moral interest (Morgan and Meier, 1995; Boxill, 2003; Tannsjo and Tamburrini, 2002; Parry and McNamee, 1998; Morgan, 2007). The time is ripe for a sustained, philosophically informed critical examination of the theory and practice of coaching to reflect the growing and almost universal significance of the coach as central to the social-cultural production of sports practices. Greater attention on the applied dimensions of coaching ethics is also required to support an increased demand for the professionalisation of coaches across all sports. A sound understanding of the moral aspects of coaching should be central to effective coach education programmes. The Ethics of Sports Coaching: Scope and Substantive Content There are likely to be a number of possible ways to demarcate the subject matter and focus for study of the ethics of sports coaching, but one reasonably simple approach to better appreciate the terrain is to consider three interrelated themes that are central to an understanding of coaching from a moral point of view. These are: (1) the practice of coaching; (2) the character of the coach; and (3) the coaching environment. These three themes allow for a more detailed examination of central philosophical concepts and issues needed to comprehend the moral dimensions to coaching, and how they have relevance to the practical activity of coaching. They are now presented in turn in the remainder of this summary. The Ethics of Sports Coaching Practice Coaching involves complex considerations of value, which in turn impact how the coach, as a moral practitioner, engages in his or her coaching practice. Such ethical considerations are necessarily at the heart of coaching activity and require the coach to reflect upon metaphysical and existential concerns associated with their ontological status as a coach. In other words, it is incumbent upon the coach to think carefully and critically about the meaning and value they ascribe to their coaching, and to examine how their activity makes a worthwhile contribution to their own lives and to the lives of others. In short, the key question a coach should ask himself or herself is ‘In what way does my coaching contribute to the development and sustenance of a good life, worth living?’ These broad ranging philosophical questions about the nature, purpose and value of sports coaching can be explored in a number of ways. The next two sections help to articulate some of these issues. The Aims of Sports Coaching Based on neo-Aristotelian theories of human flourishing, and in particular the Rawlsian 'Aristotelian principle ', a radically different and non-instrumental coach-athlete relationship can emerge as one based on mutual interdependency. More specifically, the good and balanced coach-athlete relationship has as its goal the mutual realisation of two complementary forms of human talent of equal worth. Within this framework, the ethical aims of sports coaching can move in three simultaneous and integrated directions – first in terms of sport performance as a natural phenomenon, second in terms of sport performance as a social-cultural construction, and third, sports performance as an expression of ethical perfectionism. The concept of ethical perfectionism as an aim for sports coaching implies rejecting manipulative performance-enhancing regimes whether they are of psychological or physical kinds. From the perfectionist perspective, the core of the sport has universal appeal. Each individual should develop his or her abilities and skills to higher degrees of complexity in virtuous ways within a framework of freedom and responsibility. Secondly, ethical perfectionism should not be interpreted in individualist terms. In the interaction with his or her athletes, a good coach is also developing his or her own talent. When this is done in an atmosphere of mutual respect and empowerment, this is a virtuous development of human social interaction into higher degrees of complexity. In their mutual search for excellence, the coach and his or her athletes lift each other forward. From a perfectionist perspective, the expert coach is not only a distanced Kantian in that each person is treated as an end in their own right, but also a skilful moral phenomenologist. He or she has an innate and delicate intuition of the moral experiences and dilemmas both of individual athletes and in the group, and the skills of developing moral sensitivity and responsibility. Sports Coaching as a Profession The terms ‘profession’ and ‘professionalism’ are inherently normative and are primarily associated with a number of select practice-based occupations such as education (teachers), health (doctors), justice (lawyers) and finance (bankers). In more recent times, there has been a move towards the ‘professionalisation’ of an increasing number of occupations, particularly those associated with service provision of one kind or another. Sport coaching is one such area where it is claimed that professionalism is necessary and desirable. The evidence to support such a claim however, rarely establishes a clear understanding as to what professionalism actually means. A central aspect in the attempt to professionalise practice-based occupations has been the acknowledgement and the valorising of the moral dimension that is inherent to such forms of employment. In theory, if not always in practice, it is largely incontrovertible that, by the very nature of a profession, the broad ranging social goods inherent to them such as justice (lawyers), wellbeing (doctors), knowledge and autonomy (teachers), (financial) independence (bankers), place particular limits on the conduct of individuals who engage in such pursuits. The crucial issue in the professionalisation of occupations therefore resides in establishing greater clarity as to how exactly professions promote social good, and what role various practitioners (such as coaches) have in promulgating such benefits through their every day involvement with the practice. Of further concern might be how best professionals can be supported and encouraged to uphold such goods by their sustaining institutions. In order to examine the claim that sports coaching is a profession, Koehn (1997) argues that the idea of ‘moral authority’ is central. In contrast to many waged occupations therefore, the professional coach is not merely an expert paid service provider. Instead, the moral authority of the coach is derived from the dissemination of the core virtues that are central to, partially definitive of, and demanded through, the proper engagement in a sporting practice. In practical terms then, evidence of professionalism, and the attending moral authority that comes with it, might be seen in the way sporting institutions set about to embed such core virtues and values within their coach education programmes. Unfortunately, at present, an over reliance on codes of conduct (and their language of moral duties, of certainty, obligations, rules and principles) and the delivery of inauthentic, decontextualised ‘ethics’ workshops often serve to consign the moral dimensions of coaching to institutional margins (McNamee, 1998). In a results-driven environment, the psycho-motor dimensions of sports performance take priority and it is no surprise that coaches ill-conceive professionalism in terms of technical expertise. Marooned by their professions, inexperienced coaches are often ill-equipped to deal with the complex moral dimensions of the role. Progress towards the kind of moral authority needed could be served through developing critical accounts of the professional moral life of the sports coach. The Sports Coach: Ethical and Moral Characteristics Coaching practice, because its central quality involves interventions that are aimed at behaviour change, means that coaches ought to be acutely aware of the ethical implications of their acts and the need to reflect carefully on how they develop their practice. Thus, coaching behaviour is understood as not just an activity guided by a personal coaching philosophy, but importantly involves the more substantial issue of establishing the normative boundaries as to how coaches should act in their professional practice. The following three sections outline critical debates that help illuminate the relation between the coach as both moral person and practitioner. The Coach and Practical Judgment Coaching involves more than a narrow and limited focus on a technical process of applied (natural) science. Instead, it can be conceived as requiring problematic, context-dependent judgements on an everyday basis. These judgements are ethically charged, and the knowledge needed in this regard can be understood with the Aristotelian concept phronesis, a form of practical wisdom that enables the coach to take account of the particularities of the situation and act upon them without subsuming them under a pre-determined theoretical and universal framework. Some parts of the knowledge needed by coaches are theoretical and technical and can be learned in formal settings (such as on coaching courses). This is not the case with phronesis. Phronesis is learned by immersing oneself in the field of coaching together with experienced, good coaches that one tries to imitate. Phronesis and practical rationality provides an illuminating way of understanding the ethical dimensions of professional judgement in coaching. But, one might well ask if phronesis at all is possible in the world of elite competitive sports? Where winning is everything, should the coach apply only the means strictly necessary to achieve victory? Talking about actions that are not productive in themselves – as phronetic actions seem to be – sounds like misguided ideology that has no place in sporting reality, precisely because it is unproductive. However, even in elite level sport, not ‘everything goes’, and certainly in the case of pain and injury, there are limits to which such means are acceptable though they might secure the aim of improved performance. The coach with phronesis is better suited to deal with such dilemmas in good ways and able to question more generally hegemonic assumptions of what is right and wrong, possible and impossible within sports. Phronesis is problematic in that it does not give any clear directives for action apart from unclear statements such as ‘follow a well-balanced mean’. This is a common critique of Aristotle’s ethics. From an Aristotelian perspective, the answer to this critique would be that those who expect clarity and precise guidelines expect more than phronesis can provide. The domain of phronesis does not lend itself to clear and specific formulations of what is ethically right or wrong. If phronesis says too little, this is far better than promising too much. The problem with the technical rationality that dominates coaching is that – precisely because it overlooks the flux and unpredictability of human interaction – it promises too much in terms of clarity and control. Phronesis, on the other hand, provides the openness and the proper insecurity needed to deal with these situations. The Coach as Expert: Balancing Objectivity and Subjectivity One of the main challenges for a coach is to be able to effectively judge how they can improve one or a number of aspects of the performer’s abilities. Indeed the coach’s skill and ability is often evaluated on their ‘objective’ capacity to perform such tasks, but this leaves much to be explained as debate will arise over such capacities and which skills, exactly, are valuable to have and why having and exercising them, or, indeed, imparting them indicates coaching excellence. In practical terms, determining the objective standards appropriate to coaching has ethical implications in terms of how they should inspire attitudes in their players towards the rules, what norms, procedures and practices should be adopted in training and preparing for performance. Such objective coaching judgment is also needed in terms of how the coach engages with sport science support, their conception of sportsmanship and the degree of resonance their approach to sport morality has with morality in general. A coach’s views on such questions amount to what can be fairly called a ‘coaching philosophy’. Differences in coaching philosophy will exist, but more important is whether such coaching ‘worldviews’ can be judged from a more objective standpoint. The contrast between objectivity and subjectivity involved in coaching judgments can be informed by the ideas of Thomas Nagel (1986: 5) who suggests thought can move in one of two directions. When we want to acquire a more objective understanding of something, “we step back from our initial view of it and form a new conception which has that view and its relation to the world as its object.” When the process is repeated, a more objective conception of the world emerges. In the case of coaching judgments that are of a moral kind, the standpoint that might best help is one that occupies an objectivity that has moved away from the “morality of private life, but less occupies a standpoint less objective than of physics.” This idea suggests a continuum of positions helps inform judgments particular to sport coaching. This impression might be correct, but might also depend in part upon contestable conceptions of morality (that are often over-objectivised?) and sport (that are often over-subjectivised?). Perhaps a most fruitful approach might be the piecemeal demonstration of how different aspect of sports coaching fit along this objective-subjective continuum. The Sports Coach as a Role Model Another helpful approach for understanding the ethical role of the coach is from the perspective of virtue ethics. It has been argued that virtue ethics provides a useful and informative background for exploring the nature and scope of coaching practice at both a theoretical and practical level (McNamee, 1995; Brown, 1990). The basis of this claim stems from the idea that playing sport is implicated in broader conceptions of pursuing valuable goals and living good lives through the cultivation and development of virtues. It is not controversial to suggest that (im)moral character is displayed in sport, but at the same time, sport is a place where good moral character can be nurtured and developed. A key element of this possibility, however, is the coach and her character, attitude and values. The coach, therefore, plays a central role in influencing the moral terrain, not just at the most local level of their own group of players/athletes, but also within contemporary sports practices more broadly. The coaching session, the training field, the changing room and the game, are all environments where children (and older athletes), with the presence of the coach, develop and test the moral dimensions of their (evolving) characters. The coach, therefore, has a central role in this process and ought to positively influence what is happening, endeavouring to ensure that the moral encounters possible within the coaching context go well rather than badly. Virtue ethics addresses three important and related questions. First, what kind of person should a coach be - what would a catalogue of coaching virtues look like? Second, how should a coach behave and act - what kind of example should a coach set, how might a coach be a role model and help set the moral standards for their charges? Thirdly, it deliberates on what the purpose of coaching should be - is it a moral or technical enterprise, should it be about developing persons as well as athletes? The Ethical Dimensions of Distinctive Coaching Environments The previous sections in this article have identified a number of common issues that pertain to the ethics of sports coaching and in particular have highlighted common moral concerns related to the nature of the practice of coaching and the embodied nature of being a coach. In the main, the ideas raised have largely identified a raft of common, but rather abstract moral considerations without either identifying how such ideas might be applied in practice, or how they are relevant to particular coaching environments. In this final section, we identify more clearly how such ethical consideration might be useful for practitioners. We do this by way of an overview of a number of specific coaching environments that are likely to present coaches with a number of distinct problems. The coaching contexts and particular issues presented are neither meant to be typologically exhaustive nor analytically exact, but instead are designed to provide an accurate representation of the kinds of ethical concerns that arise in sports coaching situations. Coaching Children Coaches have a role in the moral education of children. It is a truism that coaches of children's sport are expected to display and encourage high standards of sportsmanship and fairness in their coaching roles and activities. These are of course complex, contested ideas. It is a tall order to expect children's coaches, who are mainly volunteers and parents, to come to their task with a ready grasp of these ideas, particularly given the corrupt understandings of sport that are prevalent in our culture. Coaches' training programmes are little help. Most do not provide any tuition in these areas, or they give them only a cursory review, or they focus on issues of legal responsibility and liability under the heading of "ethics." Moreover, the moral context that coaches inhabit, and to which they are expected to respond and provide moral leadership and guidance, is considerably more complex than this. Sport often provides some of a child's earliest and most vivid experiences, not only of ideas of teamwork and fairness toward others, but also of darker features of human interaction. Cheating, poor sportsmanship, envy at success, disdain for failure, being treated unfairly or receiving unfair advantages, mistreatment and even abuse of children and adults are some of the situations involving moral failure to which a coach will be expected to respond and provide some moral guidance. Any coach involved in children’s sport should consider four things: (1) Their understanding of the breadth and depth of complexity of the moral issues and problems that coaches of young children face; (2) what general conceptual understanding about relevant key moral issues and concepts guide their behaviour; (3) what strategies they have developed for responding to situations involving various types of injustice and disrespect; and (4) to demand that programmes for training children's coaches need to highlight all these issues and provide instruction in these areas. Coaching Adolescents Sport can be conceived of as a form of intelligence, which is acquired and refined in the context of relations with coaches and parents. Sporting intelligence is not simply athleticism, nor is it simply a conceptual understanding of tactics and strategies. Rather, it is also ‘game sense,’ the ability to adapt readily and perform creatively and effectively to solve game problems. On this account, the coach should be a facilitator of learning by encouraging athletes to take risks, be innovative and develop their autonomy and rationale judgment through being responsible for decision making. While coaches and parents have a duty of care to ensure the safety and wellbeing of young athletes, risk taking behaviour can contribute to athlete growth and development if it is done so in an ethically sound manner. Central to this process is how the coach develops respect for his athletes as ‘persons.’ The athlete as a person means that the coach should not treat athletes as machine-like things that are acted upon or as objects to be used as a means by someone else (e.g., to fulfil the parent’s dreams). An essential feature of personhood is thought to be self-determination - the opportunity and ability to weigh up the pros and cons of alternative courses of action, make decisions without undue reliance on others and accept responsibility for one’s choices. In popular terms, personhood refers to the ability to “stand on your own two feet,” or “be your own person.” The coach, therefore, has a central role to provide parental support in an ethically sensitive manner in order to promote the young athlete’s development as a person. Male Coaches and Female Athletes The sports environment can be a fertile place for [mostly male] predatory coaches to engage in harassing or abusive behaviour. As a result, it is now accepted that sporting organisations have a wide range of responsibilities to provide a harassment-free environment for athletes. Some of these responsibilities may come into conflict with some traditional ideas that are believed to be integral to the improvement of the young athlete’s performance. Whilst some research suggests that almost 1 in 4 female athletes experience some form of unwelcome behaviour by a coach that would normally be defined as sexual harassment, Tomlinson and Yorganici (1997) report thatonly half of the athletes consider these actions as sexual harassment. Victim-athletes often do not report forms of unwelcome behaviour experienced in sport as sexual harassment, deciding instead to adopt coping strategies fired by a blend of pragmatism and ambition in an environment of sport that imposes weak organisational controls over coaches in positions of great power. Sexual harassment is most often used as a tactic that reinforces some traditional form of (male) dominance in an activity. This creates a culture of sport, particularly in women’s sport, which is ripe for abuse, exploitation and harassment. Of particular concern are those junior coaching environments where coaches and female athletes are socially and physically isolated. It is incumbent upon sports organisations not only to ensure that their coaching polices as well as their oversight and evaluative regimes appropriately safeguard against unwelcome and despicable individuals, but in addition, that at all levels, and embedded in daily practice, is a spirit and ethos of openness and proactive communication with athletes and parents. Coaching Paralympic Athletes Paralympic sport is a relative young phenomenon in comparison to the Olympic movement. Since its beginnings, it has been through many changes with regard to who its participants are, the aims of the sport and the level at which competition is carried out. Paralympic sport has a medicinal origin where physical activity was used to rehabilitate injuries or to ameliorate congenital impairments. Today, participation in Paralympic sport has widened to include athletes with other types of debilitations, as well as visual impairments and learning difficulties. The level of the sport has changed from being aimed mainly at patients, where the sporting activities existed as a part of their rehabilitation process, to being Paralympic sports aimed at high level competitors. The performances of some athletes such as swimmer Natalie Du Toit, sprinter Oscar Pistorius and cross-country skier Brian McKeever, have raised the possibility that Paralympic athletes are able to complete alongside non-Paralympic athletes. The gradual narrowing of the gap between Olympic and Paralympic performances reflects a key change in Paralympic sports which sets new coaching challenges. It has required a shift from coaching carried out by medical staff or special needs educators, towards coaching carried out by sports specialist recruited from practices and institutions orientated towards sport for people without disabilities. This change presents many benefits and challenges to the coaches, to the sport and to the athletes. The change requires clarity as to what ways, if any, coaching Paralympic sport differs from ordinary competitive sport? In particular, it requires the coach to think about how they should balance their coaching practice with regard to the ability/disability of the participants and knowledge about the particular sport. In addition, Paralympic coaching present special concerns with regard to classification. As the differentiation of classes are based on function and/or ability, coaches and athletes who are aiming for results and driven by the more competitive ideology of performance sport may consider the rights and wrongs of manipulating the classification system to maximise the possibilities of winning. Coaching and the Ethics of Talent Identification Elite sport increasingly forces young children to engage in harmful practices with a negligible chance of ultimate success. Moreover, many talent development practices exclude potentially able young performers based on unwarranted assumptions about later development. The result is an indefensible partitioning of finite resources of time and funding for increasingly small populations. The reason for such practices is evident as elite sport is costly, for society and for the players/athletes who engage in it. Unlike most other contexts of sport, those performing at the highest levels of sport are working in a necessarily selective environment. While this may mean that selection is acceptable, such acceptance is conditional. Of primary concern for the coach is that selectivity should be based on the cultivation of innate abilities rather than from profiting from scarce opportunities presented to a player heavily mediated by social and environmental chance. This view suggests that elitism, and the process of selectivity this entails, is a reasonable (perhaps attractive) approach when coaching competitive sport even at a young age. It also proposes that exclusivity is not acceptable if sports coaching fails to appropriately support all individuals into or out of elite talent development programmes. Coaches should be constantly aware of the role that they have to mediate and ensure that their sport (and its developmental pathways) does not result in the coaching of the talented to be based on little more than an accident of geography or upbringing. Coaching and Performance Enhancement One of the coach's roles, if not their primary purpose, is to help the athlete to improve and enhance his or her performance. There are many ways in which performance enhancement can be achieved including rigorous and systematic training, proper diet, management of injury risks and improving motivation. A wealth of scientific information is now available to coaches and other specialists in order to fine tune the process. Much of this is often considered morally unproblematic. However, there are also other resources available for the coach, which seem to provide improvement, but clearly raise concerns because of their legal or moral status. In the realm of performance enhancement, it is appropriate to see that rather than operating as an individual, the approach an athlete takes is largely based on the collective decision making of a group seeking a common goal, the most influential of which is often not the athlete, but their coach. However, as Teetzel (2006) points out, when it comes to doping in sport, the blame almost entirely rests on the individual athlete. While is may be the case that athletes are not unduly coerced by their collective, Teetzel points out that despite an athlete’s causal responsibility, their ‘support group’ and in particular the coach must shoulder a significant degree of responsibility. It seems empirically the case that athletes cannot, by themselves engage in acquiring the kind of knowledge nor support infrastructure to ensure the partaking of a performance efficient and detection proof course of pharmaceutical enhancement. Without the assistance of others, and in particular the coach, this would not be possible. In the case of drugs in sport, therefore, the relationship between the athlete who takes the banned substances and the coach who facilitates such usage is clearly problematic, rendering all socially and morally accountable for the act. Unfortunately, as current policies and practices, except in the most extreme cases, place blame entirely on the athlete, anti-doping officials, at best, misdirect much of what is wrong, and at worst, are institutional negligent, by serving to reify the complicitous nature of doping. Coaching Dangerous and Violent Sports Sport manifests violence, aggression and assertive behaviour. Some sports are inherently dangerous primarily due to the degree of risk they involve (i.e. climbing, water-sports, winter sports, motor sports). Other sports are necessarily violent (combat sports such as boxing, judo, tae kwando, and contact sports such as rugby, ice hockey and football,) because they require aggression for success. The former typically involve considerations of introduction (to), encouragement and facilitation, while the latter require coaching per se. Through conceptual analysis, it is possible to construct a typology, which suggests certain categories of sport that have a dangerous element to them, such as rugby and ice-hockey, are so because they require aggression rather than violence. Then there are explicitly combative sports such as boxing and other ‘no rules’ varieties where the danger is related to the inherent nature of the contesting action. The label ‘dangerous sport’ is more commonly ascribed to those activities that involve interaction with an environment that necessarily put participants in harms way. They include climbing, freediving, BASE jumping, big wave surfing, equestrian and mountain biking. The moral debate here often pits paternalists, who consider there should be limits on an individual’s freedom of choice to engage in such activities, and those of libertarians who consider that if there is no harm to others, then individuals should be free to engage in such activities. From a coaching perspective, the development of tactics and techniques that involve means of violence, harm, intimidation and humiliation to others should be robustly attacked and are seriously misplaced. This may require coaches to consider carefully the role they undertake in influencing how athletes behave towards each other and how they treat themselves. Foreign Coaches and National Teams The current wave of sport globalisation has increased and accelerated the transnational flow of labour, capital, technologies, imageries, ideas and information. Coaching is one area in which sport has developed a transnational character. This is the case not only at national competition but also at the international level as well. Whereas national teams have traditionally been led by coaches of the same nationality, globalised national sport officials have recently been keen on hiring foreign coaches to lead their teams. For example, New Zealander Robbie Deans coaches the Australian men’s rugby union team and Italian Fabio Capello coaches England’s men’s football side. Similarly, in the 2008 Olympics, Argentine Raúl Lozano, Japanese Masayo Imura and French José Ruiz managed Poland’s men’s volleyball, China’s women’s synchronised swimming and Mali’s women’s basketball teams, respectively. Philosophically, it is possible to develop a position to defend the practice in a way that does not constitute a breach of patriotic duty. Doing so requires a critique of the more extreme forms of patriotism which underpins the view that expatriate coaching is unpatriotic. In fact, in certain circumstances, expatriate coaching promotes a set of desirable values that has the potential to enhance international sport competition and foster multicultural education. 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NOTE: The structure and content of this summary represents an overview of a forthcoming edited book with the same name from Routledge in its Ethics in Sport series (http://www.routledge.com/books/The-Ethics-of-Sports-Coaching-isbn9780415557757.) Thanks go to the contributors to the book for their involvement in this project and many of the ideas represented in this paper. Contact Dr. Alun R. Hardman University of Wales Institute Cardiff Cardiff, UK Email: ahardman@uwic.ac.uk Dr. Carwyn R. Jones University of Wales Institute Cardiff Cardiff, UK Email: CRJones@uwic.ac.uk http://www.icsspe.org