Abstract
Quality relationships between coaches and their team members (e.g., coaching staff, athletes) play an important role in promoting individual (e.g., member satisfaction) and team-level outcomes (e.g., cohesion). Trust has been identified as a key feature of these quality relationships, yet little research exists examining how these trusting relationships can be built. By adopting a narrative inquiry approach, we sought to elicit coaches’ stories on their (a) perceived approaches to building trust with team members (i.e., coaching staff, athletes) and (b) life experiences that shaped their approaches. We recruited 18 Canadian interuniversity coaches, who engaged in semi-structured interviews which we analyzed using a story analyst approach. From these conversations, we found that coaches drew from one of two narratives with regard to initial trust development: ‘It needs to be given’ and ‘It needs to be earned’. When sharing stories about trust maintenance, however, all coaches drew upon a third narrative: ‘It needs give and take’. Coaches’ stories were situated within broader sociocultural narratives (e.g., mental toughness, performance, and relational narratives) and the underlying plots of each narrative were also identified. Altogether, our findings illuminate the personal and social complexities of building trust from the coach perspective, while reinforcing the importance of being intentional when seeking to develop quality, trusting relationships within high performance sport. Theoretical and practical implications will be discussed alongside future research directions.
