CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sports Coaching: Performance and Development
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1675173
This article is part of the Research TopicHigh Performance Sports Coaching and Athlete TransitionView all 4 articles
Ethical Coaching and Athlete Transitions - A Foucauldian Perspective on High-Performance Sports
Provisionally accepted
- 1Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
- 2Universitetet i Innlandet, Elverum, Norway
- 3Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
High-performance sport is often celebrated for cultivating discipline, resilience and excellence. Yet, the same structures that produce elite performance frequently rely on disciplinary practices that can compromise athlete autonomy, well-being and identity development. This article interrogates the ethical dimensions of coaching in high-performance sport through a Foucauldian lens, drawing on concepts such as disciplinary power, technologies of the self and the aesthetics of existence. Building on the work of Jim Denison and colleagues, as well as our own previous work, we examine how coaching practices shape athlete subjectivities both during and after elite sporting careers. The paper presents a framework that coheres a number of key concepts from existing coaching research and enriches them through a Foucauldian ethical perspective, offering a unified way of understanding the ethical dimensions of coaching. We argue that coaching must be reimagined as an ethical, relational and reflexive practice that goes beyond harm reduction to actively support athlete well-being and meaningful, sustainable transitions beyond sport. We explore how ethical self-creation can enable coaches to resist dominant norms and develop care-based coaching approaches that challenge the performance-at-all-costs ethos. We also consider how these insights align and contrast with existing youth sport philosophies and conclude by proposing a set of guiding principles for fostering ethical and sustainable coaching environments. In doing so, the paper offers a contribution to sport coaching research and practice by illuminating how coaches can engage in ethical self-work and systemic transformation, positioning athletes not only as performers but as whole persons capable of living meaningful lives in and beyond sport.
Keywords: Ethical coaching, Foucauldian theory, High-performance sport, Athlete transitions, disciplinary power
Received: 29 Jul 2025; Accepted: 08 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gerdin and Pringle. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Göran Gerdin, goran.gerdin@lnu.se
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.