Emotional intelligence, helping others and generativity: perspectives of community sport coaches

Community sport coaches in the UK and elsewhere are typically tasked with improving the personal/social development, life skills and life chances of young and disadvantaged participants. Interestingly, whilst emotional intelligence is frequently used within performance sport coaching literature as a precept of effective practice, there remains little related to specific usage within the community sport context, or to how more humanistic interpretations/approaches may underpin applied practice. In order to further understanding in these areas, this study used a qualitative framework and undertook semi-structured interviews with nine highly experienced community sport coaches. Results revealed values of empathic, humanistic, sharing approaches, illustrated and explained by their motivations to help others that needed support and, without necessarily always explicitly operationalizing it as such, their recognition and use of emotional intelligence. The implications for these are discussed within the paper