I have been lucky enough to be able to collaborate in the writing of a chapter in this book, due for publication on the 31st July and available for order on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0956627064/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE.My chapter is entitled 'Understanding parental influence on child athletes : from fanatical to disinterested parents'. The chapter considers the relative power relationship of the coach, athlete and parent, and how it can affect the athlete's development. It draws on some examples from gymnastics, both in Russia and America, as well as from other sports, and considers some of the guidelines developed by sports governing bodies to try to encourage best practice.
My co-authors (Butler, Hedge and Cunliffe) are all students on the sports management programme at the University of Central Lancashire, and the book is edited by Dr Clive Palmer. Regular readers of this blog will recognise him as the author of the PhD thesis on gymnastics judging. It is an eclectic collection of work that will be of interest to students of sports studies, management and coaching, and anyone with an interest in sport.
Clive's description is as follows:
'With over 120 contributors across 60 chapters, their ages ranging from 6 months to 60 years, the Sports Monograph represents a compendium of voices; telling experiences and rich perspectives, all stimulated by personal involvement in sport, Physical Education and sports culture. Consequently, the volume has a broad remit but a common theme. This has permitted a refreshing degree of freedom for people across a wide spectrum of education to register their thoughts and feelings about physical culture as they may have experienced it. Chapters are generally of two styles; first, academic essays of sporting interest with critical and factual discussion, and second, creative stories, poems and other biographical reflections which bring to the fore the realities of sport and PE. The latter conspicuously holding up a mirror to those theorised experiences, revealing quite vividly the primacy, sensuality and emotional importance of being physically educated, but through the medium of literature.'
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