Political Skill in Community Sport Coaching Work

Abstract

This chapter discusses the political skill and exploring why community sport coaches might benefit from developing such social sensibilities. The chapter concludes by considering the place of political skill in the education and continuous professional development of practitioners, including how these interpersonal abilities might be facilitated across the community sport coaching workforce. Ferris et al.‘s political skill framework comprises four distinct but interrelated components, namely social astuteness, interpersonal influence, networking ability, and apparent sincerity. Possessing social astuteness could clearly benefit the enactment of community sport coaching work. The chapter argues that political skill is an important but often underrepresented feature of community sport coaching. In the UK - as with many countries - sport gradually became seen as a valid site of public - and thus state - interest, at both elite and recreational level around the middle of the twentieth century.