Exploring the potentials of Co-creation for coach learning: An Action Design Research study

Coaches play a crucial role in shaping children’s sporting experiences, making it problematic that coaches working with individuals with disabilities often have lower levels of resources and training. Despite the increase in research on coach education, its impact for coach learning remains low. Some scholars attribute this to limitations of the prevailing formal model of coach education, which fails to address the complexities of the specific context, thereby posing challenges for coaches in implementing new approaches. Consequently, they advocate for informal coach educational activities, prompting learning through exploration of various strategies for coping with encountered challenges in one’s practice. Using Action Design Research (ADR), the project aimed to explore the potentials of combining formal and informal approaches for coach learning. This was done through co-creation of coaching materials over one and a half years within Happy League, a Danish handball community consisting of 80 clubs with approximately 1500 players with different disabilities and 400 coaches with heterogeneous coaching backgrounds. A ten-week developmental phase, compromising weekly design meetings with the founders of Happy League, was followed by two workshops that introduced the materials to around 100 Happy League coaches. Subsequently, all 400 Happy League coaches were provided with the materials, and we sought to evaluate their experiences with implementation through online opinion polls, written reflections, and a national workshop. This evaluation informed the creation of the final materials, including a booklet featuring playful drills, on-court artifacts, and five instructional videos. A reflective thematic analysis was employed based on data from coaches’ written reflections and field notes from workshops and design meetings. Our findings demonstrate the workshops to be pivotal in facilitating coaches learning of material usage, while the collaborative nature of ADR ensured that the designed materials were tailored to the specific context and readily implementable within the coaches’ practice.