Obituary: William George ‘Bill’ Taylor

Abstract

It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of Sports Coaching Review Editorial Board member, Dr William (Bill) Taylor. He died suddenly recently, whilst cycling with a friend across America. Many of you would no doubt be aware of Bill’s contribution to the sports coaching field as author, pedagogue and practitioner. Although he was all of these things without doubt, he was also much more; a back-stage driving force behind much of the critical coaching agenda. I first met Bill following an appointment as an external examiner at Manchester Metropolitan University in the mid-1990s. First impressions? An undoubtedly thorough thinker who definitively stood for “things” (the fact that I also shared many of those “things” made us natural professional allies). Admittedly, administration was not quite his strongest suit (!) as, for Bill, there were far more important things to be concerned about in Higher Education. In many ways, a professional scholarship was a second career for Bill; his first being that of a builder or rather “working the bricks” as he would have it. Notwithstanding some teasing about how could someone so compliant to angles, straight lines and measurements ever become a bone fide critical academic, what that experience had alternatively (and gratefully) grounded in Bill was an earthiness to value relationships and a faithfulness to what he deemed important. Having somewhat drifted professionally apart when my time at MMU ended, we reignited a personal and professional friendship through the work to establish and develop SCR and, more significantly CRiC (the Cluster for Research into Coaching); an initiative originally driven by Dave Day and Bill at MMU. CRiC conferences held at MMU (in 2011, 2013, 2015), Cardiff Met (2017), Worcester (2019) and Loughborough (2022), respectively, brought together for the first time a community of scholars (and coaches/coach educators) who saw (and see) coaching as a more dynamic, social and complex enterprise than had previously been considered. For many of us, such meetings became SPORTS COACHING REVIEW 2023, VOL. 12, NO. 3, 251–252 https://doi.org/10.1080/21640629.2023.2211497