"Walking the Tightrope": Reflections on Mobilizing Foucauldian Theory Within an Endurance Running Coach Development Intravention

This paper presents our efforts and subsequent reflections in attempting to make Foucauldian theory accessible and relevant to a group of high-performance endurance-running coaches within the context of a coach development intravention and Foucauldian inspired workshop series. Specifically, we reflect upon our efforts to introduce coaches to Foucauldian ideas and concepts such as the knowledge-power-practice triad and upon the tensions we experienced in doing so. These tensions were related to the power of the theory-practice divide to set expectations around what it means to be an effective coach developer and a high-performance coach but also in the main related to our intentions regarding a broader shift in the coaches' thinking concerning the influence of a number of social forces in the formation of their practices. We contend that coaching scholars invested in mobilizing ways of knowing underpinned by a different logic (e.g., relationally informed ways of knowing) within coaching and coach development settings would benefit from a deeper understanding of the politics of sports coaching knowledge and practice and how relations of power-knowledge impact learning within pedagogical contexts. Such an awareness, we believe, would in turn support more targeted pedagogical frameworks, practices, and strategies specifically aimed at disrupting established relations of power- knowledge and related problematic binary understandings such as the theory-practice divide which stand in the way of more diverse and ethical knowledge production processes in sports coaching and coach development work.