Colum Cronin is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Education and Sport Coaching at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. He was nominated for the young scholar award by Professor Kathleen Armour who supervised Colum’s doctorate in education at the University of Birmingham, in 2016. Colum’s thesis was titled “Being a Youth Performance Coach: A Hermeneutical Phenomenological Investigation.” This thesis, and indeed Colum’s research more generally, explores the lived experiences of sport coaches. He often uses narrative representations to communicate his research and has explored a range of topics including talent identification, technology in coaching, disability sport coaching, and care for athletes. Most recently, Colum has published on care for coaches who experience mental illness. Indeed, care is a theme of Colum’s research and he has recently co-authored the book ‘Care in Sport Coaching: Pedagogical Cases’ published by Routledge. This book, like much of Colum’s research, draws upon a range disciplines including sociology, psychology, and philosophy
At the AIESEP World Congress Colum will present on the notion of a ‘Care Ceiling in Sports Coaching’. In this presentation Colum will consider how coaches who engage in caring acts may be restricted in their own career progression. Thus, the presentation will examine a barrier to establishing coaching as a more caring profession. In the future Colum plans to “continue pursuing sport pedagogy research by extending my network through AIESEP. Specifically, I aim to further explore sport pedagogy through interdisciplinary research and across international contexts.”
