Coach and archers in competition: d'Arripe 2001

The study looks closely at what happens between a coach and his archers during competition. The participants were an expert coach from the French national team and four archers, all men: two among the world's top eight (one an Olympic and European champion, the other a European champion and world medallist) and two national champions. The analysis brings out three typical ways in which the coach steps in: analysing a drop in performance when the archer comes to him, without having watched beforehand; doing the same after having watched; and stepping in on his own initiative when he sees an archer in serious trouble. When things are going well the coach stays out of the shooting, and when an archer is working out a solution alone he lets him get on with it; even when he already has an idea, he gets the archer to talk first.

The archers, for their part, mostly work alone and use the coach as a source of information when a slump persists. Agreement comes at once when the coach has seen the end and reads it as the archer does; when he has not seen it, agreement has to be built through discussion, and if there is no time before the next end the coach falls back on general advice, such as recalling the competition plan. Finally, the archers adapt the advice in their own way, keeping the instructions they find most useful.

The method comes from ergonomics: action is observed in its setting and reconstructed from the point of view of the person doing it. The authors filmed and recorded the interactions during two important competitions, an 8-hour international event with the world's top eight archers and prize money, and a two-day national event that preceded selection for the 1998 European championships, 22 and a half hours in all. The coach wore a concealed microphone, a camera stood behind the shooting line, and a second researcher with headphones took notes.

In the days after each competition every participant reviewed his own footage and described what he was doing, thinking and feeling at those moments (self-confrontation interviews): 15 situations chosen jointly, 10 interviews and 310 pages of transcripts in all. The text was divided into 404 elementary units of meaning, then grouped into recurring sequences and structures by two researchers working independently, checked by two more researchers and read back by the participants.

It is a study of a single coach and four male archers from the same national team, who knew each other well, at two competitions in the late 1990s: it describes how they collaborated, not how all coaches work. The situations reviewed were chosen from those most significant to the participants, and exchanges away from the shooting line were not recorded. The two researchers who collected the data knew the group well from earlier consultancy, which helps trust but may colour the interpretation. There is no outcome measure: the study does not say whether any kind of intervention led to better shooting. There are also minor inconsistencies in the text: the archers' recurring series number three or four depending on the paragraph, and the discussion calls the 11 sequences in the table macrosequences.

For an archer and coach the study offers a concrete description of a working relationship that functioned well at that level. The coach watched far more than he talked: of his typical actions, seven involved observing and interpreting (following the end, the scores, the wind, the archer's reactions, listening to him) and four involved intervening. When an archer was shooting well he did not distract him; when an archer came to him with a problem he first asked him to describe it, and one archer says this forced him to understand better what he was doing.

It is not a recipe but a portrait of a close-knit group in which the archer's autonomy was the starting point. It does show two things worth knowing: in competition the time left before the next end shapes what coach and archer can say to each other, and advice is accepted more readily when both have seen and read the same thing.