What Intercollegiate Athletics Coaches Wish Faculty Knew: Implications for Curriculum and Instruction

Abstract

Collegiate athletics coaches play a vital role in the lives of student-athletes and regularly interact with the membersof their teams more than faculty given the nature of athletics practice schedules compared to academic classschedules. Although the primary purpose of university attendance at all universities is pursuit of academic degrees,student-athletes receive broad non-academic, life-skills oriented education from athletics coaches. Typically, teachingfaculty at American colleges and universities hold terminal degrees in their fields, but unlike internationaluniversities, faculty in the U.S. are not required to have any particular training in pedagogy. Due to the enormousamount of time athletics coaches spend with student-athletes, coaches, by nature must be effective communicators,effective motivators, effective teachers, and effective ethical models for their student-athletes to a degree notnecessary for faculty members. The purpose of this paper was to gather recommendations from coaches for facultymembers regarding needs of student-athletes, and a comparison of the perception of student-athlete needs betweencoaches and faculty members. We employed a mixed methods convergent parallel design. We administered aquestionnaire that included both an open-ended response section to what the respondent wished faculty knew withrespect to student-athlete success, and three Likert scale questions related to confidence in what faculty knew or didwith respect to student-athlete academic needs. Based on the thematic coding of the responses by coaches, andquantitative analysis of the Likert scale questions, recommendations for faculty regarding curriculum and instructionare given in the discussion section.