Understanding Disability and Cultural (Re)production: An Ethnography of Coaching Practice in High Performance Disability Sport

Context

This article is based on an ethnographic study of an international learning disability sport team. The squad operated semi-autonomously; it was funded, resourced and managed by the high performance arm of the Sports Governing Body (SGB) ¹ meaning that the players wore the same jerseys as the ‘mainstream’ male and female national squads, instilling a sense of pride, identity and elitism in the squad.

The management, administration and direction of the squad was the responsibility of Peter, the Head of Disability Sport for the SGB. The coaching staff of the learning disability squad were contracted ² to oversee the day-to-day management of the team, comprising highly qualified high performance coaches, ³ George (head coach) and Ben (assistant coach) and a number of support staff including Clara (nutritionist), Marcus (physiotherapist), Aiden and Jimmy (strength and conditioning coaches) and Don (team manager). Together, the coaching staff reflected a clear trajectory towards high performance.

The coaching context was further governed by a classification process regulating athlete eligibility. In order to be profiled to play as an international the players had to provide evidence of an impairment originating before 18 years of age. ⁴ This was usually evidenced in the form of a statement of special educational needs. The players were assessed by an educational psychologist as having an IQ of 75 or less and underwent an ‘adaptive behaviour assessment’ in which they showed significant limitations in social functioning, often related to their level of independence and autonomy. This classification system ensured that impairment was present and that it functioned as a limitation on sporting performance. The 15 athletes involved in the study were aged between 16 and 27. Seven had diagnosed co-occurring autism spectrum disorders. In addition, many of the players presented further complex needs such as mental health issues (e.g. depression and anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorders). In this case, the ethnography comprised an institutionally supported and integrated coaching process involving coaches, athletes and wider stakeholders (e.g. parents) within a specific sport governing body structure that emphasised a categorical approach to disability sport.

Ethnography

Bourdieu’s entire work demonstrates a commitment to ‘making sense’ of the shared patterns of behaviour, beliefs and language of different groups. Following this approach within a disability sport culture, I (RT) joined the squad as an assistant coach over a period of 18 months through two winter training cycles and summer competitive season. In this time, I was granted full access as a member of the coaching staff. In committing to studying the culture ‘first hand’, I wore the same kit as the staff, was (more often than not) the object of and eager participant in the casual ‘banter’ and sport-specific ‘shop talk’ that was central to the majority of interactions. In the training hall and on game days I worked ‘hands on’ with the players. Reflecting the natural hierarchies within coaching, initially my role was that of reinforcing and conveying messages from the senior coaches, providing encouragement often, but ‘technical’ advice and input at their discretion. As time progressed, George (head coach) actively gave me more responsibility, asking me to lead sessions, direct specific practices and generally allowing me to establish authority as a trusted voice for the players.

Away from the training hall, I pursued activities that would naturalise a presence among the staff and players. Long periods spent travelling, working and socialising with the group created a complex position in being simultaneously a part of the object of study, both participating and observing. ⁵ Throughout the fieldwork process I coached, observed, asked questions and kept field notes of the day-to-day workings of the training camps and competitive fixtures. These included, but were not limited to, the interactions between players and staff at various points, such as evening meals and time spent in hotel bars, gyms and sports clubs, as well as significant time spent ‘on the shop floor’ in the training hall. Though it was never forgotten, the fact that I was a researcher was not overly constraining and my position on the coaching staff guaranteed both entry and access (see Townsend and Cushion, 2021). To supplement the data generated from the participant observation, I conducted interviews at varying points throughout the fieldwork – ranging from unstructured conversations to semi-structured interviews – with all of the coaching staff, as well as two focus groups; one with a cross-section of the players, and one with a cross-section of the athletes’ parents.

Bourdieu’s (1993: 18) view ‘that there is a form of interest or function that lies behind every institution or practice’ informed the ongoing analysis. Depictions of social practice were drawn from interviews, focus groups and observational data. In this sense, theory was used to think with data (Bourdieu, 1988) as a generative process, and data analysis followed a continual process of observation, description, abstraction and explanation (Atkinson, 2016), resulting in the construction of two themes, ‘Routine, Control and Pedagogic Action’ and ‘Impairment and the Exchange of Capital’.

Routine, Control and Pedagogic Action

At the core of Bourdieu’s theory of practice are the concepts of ‘habitus’, ‘capital’ and ‘field’. For Bourdieu, social practice is mediated by habitus and the exchange of capital within a given field (Bourdieu, 1977). In focusing our analysis on coaching, we are able to tease out the generative principles underlying particular forms of social practice. As such, this section focuses on the development of habitus and the establishment of forms of ‘pedagogic action’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) that served to further differentiate the athletes as disabled, while concealing and naturalising this differentiation.

Habitus are always situated within particular fields; that is, within sites of concentrated social practices. In this case, what was immediately observable in the coaching environment was a culture and associated practices that were grounded in the norms of able-bodied ‘high performance’ sport coaching:

I recruit now for performance level (coaches). I want to understand the coach’s motivations; why do they want to come into this programme? You still get quite a few answers that are like ‘oh these guys are so special they deserve this’. They don’t deserve fuck all in an elite programme they’re there because they want to be there and they want to improve and be the best that they can be. If they come in with a sense of entitlement then they ain’t gonna stay in very long, it’s about them wanting to improve themselves and that has to be the common theme between coach and player. (Peter, Head of Disability Sport – Interview)

Fields shape the production and distribution of capital among its actors:

For me it’s a performance environment now. It wasn’t four years ago. I think the fact that the players have matured, they’ve stayed together as a group, we’ve got better backroom staff, more professional backroom staff. I think by having people of that calibre around it automatically ups the game, and I think the players have responded to that. (Don, team manager – interview)

As coaches, then, we were conditioned to incorporate the values and associations of high performance sport into our coaching approaches (cf. Townsend and Cushion, 2021; Townsend et al., 2018):

I’ve not once approached the environment here as a disability environment, I’ve just approached it as another one of my coaching roles. They’re (athletes) and first and foremost. Yes, they’ve got a disability, [but] you can’t lose sight that these lads are (athletes) and they want to be the best they can be. (Ben, assistant coach – interview)

The whole point of sport, we’re in performance and we’re in it to win, simple as, it’s representative of [the national team], no matter what team it is . . . That is sport. That’s the reason why I’m in. I’m pretty sure it’s why you’re in it. (Jimmy, strength coach – interview)

However, fields contextualise, constrain and shape action, and disability was ever-present as the primary axis of social differentiation for the coaches:

It’s interesting you use the word ‘performance’ environment. There’s a distinction . . . I don’t think that we can ever really consider ourselves a fully fledged performance environment. Yes, probably against some definitions we’re a (national) team, there’s a selection process, there’s an elitism about it, we are challenging players to improve performance all the time. I think we’ve clumsily played around with what is a performance environment and we’ve tried to deliver what we perceive to be a performance environment based on other examples of performance environments with very little respect or regard to the audience we’re working with. I used a phrase a few months back about we’re a performance environment with constraints. For me good coaching is responding to the needs of your group, we just have a concentrated collection of individuals with additional requirements. (George, head coach – field notes)

The social organisation of time was crucial to this distinction, structuring the pace and rhythms of the coaching environment. To illustrate, training weekends typically ran once a month from October through to April. Management staff would meet on Friday nights at a nearby hotel, convening for breakfast after an early morning swim between 8 and 8.30 a.m. on Saturday mornings to ‘catch up’. Here, the head coach (George) outlined the plan for the weekend and briefed the coaching staff. Players staying at the hotel on Friday night would typically sit apart from the staff at breakfast, others would arrive at the training venue from 11 a.m. onwards, accompanied often by their parents. The coaching staff arrived early at the facility to ‘prep’ the training area while the players lingered in the lobby:

One of the really strong ones for me is consistency. So, communicating in a consistent manner, communicating consistent messages, acting and behaving in consistent ways. That’s really important and that’s important from me from the whole of the management that group we give the guys a degree of consistency. (George, head coach – interview)

Numerous photographs from previous international tours adorned the back wall of the training hall, depicting team celebrations and individual achievements. Laminated sheets with the words ‘OUR (Ownership, Unity and Responsibility) TEAM’ were placed strategically, reminding the players of the value-system of the squad. These words and images, though cliched, attempted to reinforce a powerful narrative of individual achievement and collective success. The players were expected to be ‘on deck’ by 11.50 a.m., to be welcomed and briefed, ready for a midday start. After the first full day of training in the weekend, the management staff would meet after dinner at the team hotel to debrief and for Don to provide the coaching staff with updates about players. These meetings were useful for situating the players in a wider contextual understanding of diagnoses and impairment effects as well as their family lives, interests and social lives away from the sport. Below is an extract from the first management meeting:

Saturday, 8.30 p.m.

George addressed the management group as we filed into the private room in the hotel.

To give you a bit of background on this, there was numerous times last winter – and through the summer – where I thought I had a grasp on the guys and their lives and what goes on, and [Don] would mention something and I’d go ‘oh, I don’t remember that . . . I didn’t know . . .’ so I just thought it would be really useful, partly for me and I thought well if I’m gonna sit through it I’m gonna make you lot sit through it.

Laughter.

There seems to be a pretty positive response from the guys to the fact that [Don] can talk to them about stuff that isn’t (sport). [Don] can ask them questions about their life and school and college and work, so it’s just trying to build that little background picture of what’s going on in their lives, so that’s why I’ve asked [Don] to pull this together tonight – basic information about life, about home, family unit around them, club where they play their (sport) outside of us, any sort of things that cropped up, and also some information around a brief summary of what their diagnosis is, what that looks like in real life and how it might impact the way we interact with them.

Don loaded up his presentation, and a profile of a player (Will), popped up on the screen

The major issue with [Will] is Klinefelter’s Syndrome which is, well you can read it there, is all to do with x chromosomes in males. He’s had counselling over this as it obviously affects his working, and that wasn’t diagnosed until mid-teens, so I think he’s kind of struggled with that a little bit. Weaker muscles, poor co-ordination and I think we’ve all noticed that –

Ben interjected from the back of the room

On a plus note though [Don] he was timing the ball better than anybody else today. He absolutely whacked it! he laughed.

I’m hoping that now that he’s away from mum and dad (in a supported living environment) that actually that just he’ll relax a bit more and open up a bit more Don finished over Ben’s laughter. (Field notes)

Pedagogic action – enacted through the practices of coaching – both reflected and transmitted a level of embodied cultural capital attributed to the players: ‘The players don’t handle change or change at short notice they can’t handle it. One of the things we’ve learnt over the years, is don’t do that to them’ (Peter, Head of Disability Sport – interview). As such, the coaches operated under conditions of continuous correction and reflexive adjustment based on the ‘indisputable materialisation’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 190) of the players’ impairments, which were mirrored in the curricula, practices and routines of coaching:

I’ve had input into getting some routines better organised. So, we’ve got a good structure, a good routine . . . so there’s that familiarity with where we’re going, what we’re doing. So, the players are hopefully more relaxed when they get to the venues, because they’ve been there before, they’ve seen it, and actually then they can focus on the bit that they should be focusing on, which is the (sport). (Don, team manager – interview)

With this bodily point of reference, social division was deeply rooted in the players as ‘natural’, shaping classification schemes for coaches and hence generating practices. This is known as the social reproduction function of cultural reproduction (Jenkins, 1992), leading to the naturalisation of the differences constituting disability (Rawolle and Lingard, 2013):

Once they’ve got it, they never forget it. With a lot of them, it’s all about the next moment. So, ‘are we doing that next?’ and that bit has just gone, you see? So, it takes a long time for it all to go in.

The structure is still pretty important, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

I noticed yesterday – well, I think it’s done on every occasion – [George], or whoever, has the chat at the beginning. I can’t see the board but I’m assuming it’s all written, and it’s there, that help, that general structure. If there is routine and timing and ‘this is what we’re addressing’ and it’s spelt out at the front, it helps immensely. But if it’s completely unstructured or you just get a blank canvas, then that’s when – there is an element or an amount of initiative they can use, but I think [they] still need that overall structure just in the background, if you like. (Parent focus group)

By basing the routine of coaching on the recognition of social difference, the coaches contributed to a ‘logic of social exchange’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 99) that closely resembled the process of symbolic violence (cf. Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). Symbolic violence as Krais (1995: 172) argues is ‘a subtle . . . invisible mode of domination that prevents domination from being recognised as such’. Symbolic violence conceals its meaning and content (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), and is engineered to produce habitus, aligning the athletes to their position in the field, that of ‘high performance (disabled) athlete’. These coaching practices were not neutral or culturally free, instead they reflected a particular subject position in relation to disability, legitimised through lasting exposure and collective understandings of what the players ‘need’:

I inherited a group of players that were very set on a routine of things, and I think that that was understandable. That’s their nature and something they like, isn’t it? I think when that is broken, I think that LD [learning disability] athletes may find that harder. (Ben, assistant coach – interview)

Furthermore, the biological differences of the players were ‘underlined and symbolically accentuated’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 192) through the structure of training sessions. To illustrate further, during training camps the coaches spent a significant amount of time revisiting and building on previously learned skills from month-to-month, with a clear focus on the replication of skills in isolation with high volumes of repetition:

Obviously with some of the attached issues for the players with their learning disability, their ability to retain information, to process information, what we tend to find is that development is a decelerated process. So, it’s very much about very simple key messages that can be repeated and revisited at a maximum volume. I think the important thing is when planning is that you don’t just plan for one camp you plan for six months because that’s probably the amount of time it’s going to take to make any meaningful progress, so then factoring in how you provide those repeat opportunities to embed, because of their disability, information retention is a challenge for them so a chance to revisit, repeat and get volume in is quite important to them. (George, head coach – interview)

Training sessions were progressed step-by-step under the scrutiny of Ben – who assumed the official role of assistant coach – and he spent much of the time during training camps and fixtures ‘on the shop-floor’ working on technical aspects of the sport, with me (RT) in a supporting role:

For me, I base my coaching around three key words really, simplicity, repetition and enjoyment. That to me is coaching in one. We’re starting to see the fruits of that now, because the lads look, they look more mature, they look more well-drilled, so yeah, I’m happy with that. (Ben, assistant coach – interview)

Throughout, disability remained the product of differentiation reflected in the routine, repetitive, behavioural function of coaching. Such was the power of this behavioural framework it was widely accepted as in the best interests of the players, ensuring the structured, and structuring nature, of players’ habitus, which provided them with the ‘sens pratique’ to react, behave and act correspondingly:

PJ: I think [Ben] has got a good brain for our squad, he’s got good methods.

RT: What do you mean by good methods?

PJ: Does he plan the sessions?

RT: With [George] yes.

PJ: Together they know how to plan a good session out.

Adam: I’m enjoying the way they’re planning it, the way we’re using our time as much as we can and really giving us . . . with [Ben] it’s ‘we do this, we have a break’, and to me that is so much it’s easier for us as players because we know what we’re doing for that time then we know we’ve got a break coming up. It’s knowing that we’ve got these things in place than just doing a session for hours, it’s the unknown that we don’t like. (Player focus group)

‘Pedagogic authority’ is a necessary component or condition of successful pedagogic action (Jenkins, 1992). The coaches were given the ‘power to act’ by the players who recognised our ‘technical competency’ and institutional authority, thus strengthening and even positively valuing the pedagogic action of the coaching staff. Furthermore, as the team manager, Don typically operated in the background during training camps, sometimes removing players from sessions to ‘catch up’ and communicated closely with the players’ parents. The majority of his role typically took place away from the training hall meeting semi-regularly with the players outside of the training camps. During training camps and on tours Don also acted as ‘mum’, ⁶ providing pastoral care to each squad member (including, he often joked, to certain members of the coaching staff):

Until the last three or four years [we’ve had] a lack of understanding of what LD is, how it manifests itself and how we can build an environment that works for the players. If I was to say I need my coaches with the LD squad to have this level of knowledge of LD, this level of knowledge of mental health issues, this level of knowledge of anxiety – those guys don’t exist! There’s a lot of Level 4 coaches out there but there’s not many of them with as good an understanding of LD as [Don] for example. [Don] is there to look after them (the players), nurse them if they need nursing and it allows the professionals to do their job. The beauty of [Don] is that he is a professional adult social care worker, so he just gets it and he understands what the guys need. (Peter, Head of Disability Sport – interview)

Though not a coach, Don contributed to the construction of coaching discourse and his role was considered crucial to support the coaches by ‘managing the behaviours and the anxiety of the players’ (Don, interview) and allowing us to focus on the technical aspects of the sport:

I’ve enjoyed seeing how the coaching staff have changed their approach through some of the things I’ve suggested and offered in terms of advice. And that is really pleasing, one of the reasons – well, going back to the reason I was recruited it’s because of my experience with people with learning disabilities. It’d be wrong for me not to share that knowledge and share that experience and be able to pass on – as team manager, I see it as if I can make the management team’s job easier then I’m doing my job. If a coach is struggling with a player in terms of communicating and I see something I’m not going to hold it, I’m going to go, ‘Right, Rob, how many key words did you use in that sentence?’ Right, okay, then have a conversation about it. Give that a go. If I can do things like that then that’s where my challenge is, not so much in terms of the day-to-day working with people with learning disabilities, it’s more about being able to support the coaches. It’s those little changes like that that I want to be able to facilitate, so that the players get the best out of the coaches, not just the other way around. (Don, team manager – interview)

Disability, therefore, was a dimension of the players’ habitus continually ‘inscribed deep in their own bodies’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 74), through coaching practices that incorporated the daily production and reproduction of doxic (i.e. foundational) ideas about disability. Where there is doxa, there is symbolic violence – a series of heavily asymmetrical practices, discourses and forces resulting in the formation of social practices that are not consciously acknowledged in terms of the social differentiation they perpetuate. Importantly, the coaching methods described above did not just fulfil a practical purpose. For coaches and athletes, this learning of the logic and culture of the field was incorporated bodily, a ‘habitus-inspired “map” of embodied action’ (Shilling, 2004: 475), with the habitus operating as an internalisation of structures. Therefore, these coaching methods provided a practical framework for socialisation encompassing a ‘structure of relations of domination and dependence’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 130), based on the naturalisation of disability, further reproducing the unequal relations of power in this context. Thus, the routinised practices of coaching produced a ritualised and standardised culture, a doxa viewed as common sense by all involved.

Impairment and the Exchange of Capital

The social arrangement of the coaching process (described above) positioned the coaches and players into a ‘durable network of institutionalised relationships’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 249) where the coaches learned to understand and respond to disability through the logic of high performance sport. The extent to which the players were able to transform their habitus was, to an extent, dependent on their accumulation of the available forms of ‘capital’ in the culture. So, embedded within the routine of coaching practice were an accumulation of arbitrary practices geared towards the exchange of capital and development of specific habitus incorporating and confirming the division between ‘able’ and disabled. The coaches, however, outlined what symbolic competencies were demanded by the high performance culture, allocating time and effort towards the accumulation and conversion of embodied cultural capital:

We have quite often been driven by players’ ability to sustain their involvement with the squad, the expectations that come with being part of this squad. I think (a) ‘personal best environment’ feels a better fit to describe what I hope we’re trying to achieve. What we talk about on a regular basis is about achieving potential. That’s a big driver for us. That can relate to players achieving potential (in their performance), through to achieving potential with time-keeping, achieving potential with personal management, hygiene, any issues that they might sort of arise within the individual, so that’s really where we focus a large percentage of our time. (George, head coach – interview)

For the players, the possession of capital had a symbolic dimension that facilitated the communication and social differentiation of power relations (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). This form of symbolic capital, or rather, the symbolic effects of capital, functioned as an instrument of recognition, bringing the players more closely in line with the expectations associated with high performance, able-bodied sport. While the players’ commitment to the squad was fulfilled primarily through attendance at training and fixtures – supplemented by regular updates on social media with the coaching staff – a secondary responsibility for embodying an elite lifestyle was expected. Consequently, the coaching staff oriented the coaching process towards behaviour change:

RT: How do you measure and view progress with the players?

Don: Four years ago, when I first started, for the first year, I was last to bed, first up in the morning. Because not all the guys are great at getting themselves up, not all the guys were good at putting themselves to bed at a sensible time for training. For me, progress now is that actually when I wake up in the morning I don’t have to be first down for breakfast, [I have] a little tick list to make sure everyone is up. I – trust isn’t the right word, but the players have responded to being treated like an adult, so now their behaviour has been modified. But that positive behaviour they’ve now shown is because they’ve been given that responsibility to manage themselves. That’s been the biggest kind of change. (Interview)

Here, the players were immersed in a coaching process that was designed to minimise the observable effects of impairment and maximise the capability for social participation through practices underpinned by challenge, ‘tough love’, and avoidance of ‘molly coddling’:

I think the reality is, what are we doing here? Are we preparing a wrapped-up group of individuals to play disability sport, or are we preparing them for a lifetime? At the end of the day, they either fail in a controlled environment where we are, and be tougher outside of it, which to me is our duty, or we let them shirk it in our environment and then they fail in an environment where the support network isn’t there, then it goes to pot completely. One of my key observations when I first came into the environment was that we were wrapping these boys up a little bit . . . and I think that there’s a danger with that, that we can molly-coddle these boys and wrap them up. I felt we protected the boys too much and were very quick to state ‘ah well that’s because of their disability’ or ‘they do that because of this’. I heard this so many times when I came into this environment. I shit you not. Five words: ‘it’s because of their impairment’. Not once has a player said to me they can’t do something because of their disability. They might’ve said, they can’t do it, but the players have never hid behind their disability, so why should a coach? It’s bullshit. (Ben, assistant coach – interview)

As members of the coaching staff, though not coaches per se, the roles of Jimmy and Aiden (strength coaches), Marcus (physiotherapist), Clara (nutritionist) were to reinforce and maintain positive behavioural change with the players, and staff briefings on camp often devoted significant time to discussing players’ physical fitness or concerns about their weight:

As you can see from the physical condition of some of the players, they’re not what you would necessarily look at as typically international athletes. It’s just about challenging the guys to be the best version of themselves you know. (George, head coach – interview)

The coaching staff thus had a powerful hold over what was deemed a ‘legitimate body’ as ‘body experts’, engineering the coaching process to include body management practices. For instance, on more than one occasion laps, push ups, burpees and sprints were used as ‘forfeits’ for intra-group competitions or ‘punishment’ when training was not of a sufficient quality or intensity. Furthermore, during winter training camps, there had been a growing concern over the players’ hydration levels, with Clara measuring and monitoring players’ ‘pee pots’ first thing in the morning, and good-naturedly ‘naming and shaming’ consistent dehydration offenders in her nutrition sessions. The players were constantly asked to make ‘sensible’ choices during team meals, and had to fill out a well-being ‘app’ every morning, charting their subjective sense of sleep, fatigue and of wellness. This was closely monitored by Marcus (physio). In terms of their physical conditioning, Aiden, Jimmy (strength coaches) and Marcus provided the players with a comprehensive list of ‘prehab’ exercises to conduct every day in their own time, regularly weighing and monitoring the players, and keeping detailed records of their fitness test results. These disciplinary techniques of high performance sport were thus appropriated and used as a subtle form of lifestyle intervention, magnifying the expression and reproduction of unequal relationships of power (Peers, 2012), further reinforcing the high performance nature of the squad:

That’s where the performance environment works, because it’s the little conversations about players, it’s the heads up, it’s the other management’s lifestyle observations and advice, it’s the physio’s advice, it’s the head coach, you know, it’s all these coming together, which I think that where it works in disability is that they have so many support staff on hand, that it allows for that to work. (Ben, assistant coach – interview)

Crucially for the players, compliance with the norms and conventions of high performance sport had exchange value. The players were able to accumulate and translate physical and embodied cultural capital through socio-behavioural change into symbolic capital associated with high performance sport:

Adam: Being in this squad does have a lot of disadvantages outside of the squad like not able to do social events, not able to do loads of other stuff because you’re either playing or training, very little rest time.

RT: What about the nutrition and the S and C [strength and conditioning] support, do you find that hard when you’re away from the squad to try and watch what you eat or carry on working out?

Reggie: My mum and dad talk to me about nutrition a lot because I eat a lot of food if I’m honest.

The players laugh

Reggie: No, not a load of rubbish I eat good stuff but I eat a lot of it if you know what I mean and I kind of exercise to burn it off, so the nutrition we always talk about what we could eat instead and I always know from [Clara] about what nutrition stuff I should be eating so I’ve learnt a lot from nutrition side.

Adam: I enjoy the nutrition and the S and C, no, I do like the extra support we’ve got.

RT: Is it hard?

Reggie: Yeah.

Adam: Now I’m working it’s a lot more harder, it’s a lot harder to [work] and think about other things as well especially when we’ve got a team of us that all just go to the chippy.

Laughter

PJ: Parties – it’s hard to stay sociable.

Jason: I’d rather call it challenges if you like. If you challenge yourself showing your ability to perform and showing why you are selected for [the national team] in the first place.

Reggie: You’ve got to work harder to earn your place almost. I think that’s the reason why everyone’s always taking it seriously because they’re representing their country and they want to stay in the team so when it comes to training or games everyone’s working hard. (Player focus group)

For Bourdieu (1990: 67), ‘belief is an inherent part of belonging to a field’ and a critical component of illusio is that the ‘buy-in’ of all players relied on a shared belief in the inherent legitimacy of the coaching practices. These data highlight the ways that a group of players refined and shaped their corporeal practices in ways that would preserve their membership of the squad, and thus their access to resources (i.e. coaches and coaching). Though well intentioned, the relationship between the coaches and athletes was unequal, where the coaching staff had symbolic power and ‘sufficient recognition to be in a position to impose recognition’ (Bourdieu, 1989: 23). The athletes were situated within a field where lasting exposure to the practices of coaching shaped the players’ habitus to the extent that their social position was in a constant state of renegotiation, and the legitimacy of the system further established:

I think the evolution of these lads as a team over the four years has been – I never thought they would be able to function the way they do. I mean, if you walked into a dressing room with them, you probably wouldn’t think they were disabled.

If you look at a lot of the lads now, all of them, you’d struggle to instantly say, oh, they’ve got an issue or a problem.

So, (Adam, player) definitely doesn’t perceive himself as being disabled. He knows that he’s in a programme like this and he qualifies to play disability (sport), but he doesn’t consider himself to be disabled. (Parent focus group)

Thus, the coaching process had all the appearances of a liberating structure, creating an instrumental relationship between the athletes, high performance disability sport and the practices of coaching to enhance their social positioning and disassociate from disability. At the same time the coaching process encompassed an economy of practices influenced by ‘cultural rules about what bodies should be or do’ (Garland-Thomson, 1997: 6), refracting social concerns such as disability, control and identity. While we acknowledge the positive effects of subverting negative perceptions of learning disabilities and providing a framework for the accumulation of valued capital, there is a subtle and implicit tension within the analysis. The coaching process did provide a unique structure for athletes with learning disabilities to minimise the structured inequalities in the symbolic value assigned to disability through the exchange of capital. Coaching itself was however based on a logic of difference that categorised disabled athletes ‘insofar as they deviate from a prescribed set of norms’ (Edwards and Imrie, 2003: 244) that were expected within high performance sport. In this sense, disability was continually inscribed on the body through the learning, acquisition and refinement of dispositions constructed in response to the players’ impairments. This created a tenuous and paradoxical position where in order to position themselves as high performance disabled athletes, the players had to disassociate as far as possible from their impairment.