Coach migration and the sharing of British expertise: some historical perspectives

Abstract

While indigenous coaching cultures are founded and sustained according to national traditions, coaching preferences cross national boundaries to influence cultural developments in other nations. This phenomenon occurs through neighbourhood diffusion, the adoption of practices in adjacent countries, and hierarchical diffusion, whereby emerging nations adopt structural features of advanced nation’s sports programmes and recruit coaching experts from those countries. This paper addresses a phase of coach migration from Britain that occurred during the late Victorian period and utilises a range of sources to present biographies of some British coaches who made an impact in America. Their collective biography illustrates some common features of these men’s lives and the effect that they had on their host nation’s coaching culture, contributing in the process to our understanding of the ways in which national coaching cultures have evolved and the relationship between the exchange of sports coaches and the transfer of knowledge and experience.