The Language of the Most Successful Professional Basketball Coaches

Bryce Correa

University of Central Florida

ENC 1102

Professor Mooney

April 8, 2020
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Discourse communities are groups of people that use similar rhetoric and communication

styles to achieve a common goal which is elaborated upon by Johns (2019) in her piece on

discourse communities. Rhetoric, according to Downs (2019), refers to the unconscious

principals that humans use when communicating. The professional basketball coaching

discourse community is goal oriented as are all sports and one of the main jobs of a coach is to

communicate effectively with their players to reach a common goal, which is winning games.

This is an intriguing discourse community to me because the effectiveness of a coach cannot

really be examined by just watching the team play since their role is behind the scenes. There

has been research on different parts of coaching such as the teaching aspect, the commitment

aspect, and the player involvement aspect of coaching. While this research is useful and

important, it is mostly from the college coaching level and below so this research will fill the

gap, examining professional coaches.

The teaching aspect of coaching is one that is mentioned by Gould (2016). According to

this source, which is focused on high school coaches, a very large part of coaching is the

teaching aspect, but this has to be done in a way that is less authoritative and more helpful. The

idea of being helpful is one that Manfred (2005) looks at in their article that concerns Zen

Buddhism. Zen Buddhism is relevant to coaching because the coach that has won the most out

of anyone is often referred to by the nickname of “the Zen Master” and in many ways, he

embodied the ideas suggested by Zen Buddhism. Zen Buddhism deal a lot with leadership and

the idea that as a leader, you can teach people, but if you are a student looking to learn, you must

empty your mind of your previous thought and beliefs first. According to Ehrenworth’s (2015)

article titled, “Those Who Can Coach Can Teach”, teaching and coaching go hand in hand. In

this study, coaches and teachers taught high school students at the same time instead of one
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teacher, the results indicated that coaches are really good teachers and have good methods of

teaching information.

Commitment to the team is another common part of coaching and playing sports. This is

a topic that Manfred (2005) addresses in their article on Zen Buddhism. Johns (1997) also

addresses commitment. Johns explains that commitment is a part of almost all discourse

communities. In the discourse community of professional basketball coaches, it is essential to be

committed to the team to have the best results which is what both of the articles attempt to show.

Player involvement is one of the most important things to a player. The players do not

want to feel as if their opinion does not matter which is why it is very important for coaches to

listen to their players. Mills (1995) and Naylor (2006) both examine this idea. Mills article

looks at coaching as teaching but also a position where you are being taught and learning how to

become better all the time. Naylor’s article is concerning competitive basketball, something that

a lot of the other articles are not looking at. Naylor explains the relationship between player

development, winning and team growth and success.

To this date there has been almost no research done that has focused on the discourse

community of professional basketball coaches. Some of the most valuable and important

information comes from interviews with the coaches in the discourse community since they are

the ones that are in control of a team which is a discourse community itself. The research that is

applicable to this discourse community is mostly focused on coaching which is a broader topic.

The goal of this is to examine a more specific part of the discourse community of coaches.

Future research could include some unsuccessful coaches and “average” coaches to compare to

the most successful coaches. This would lead to information about how much a coach actually

matters to a team (for professionals, the influence of coaches is different at all levels).
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References

Branick, S. (2019) Coaches Can Read, Too. An Ethnographic Study of a Football Coaching

Discourse Community. 384-392. From: Writing about Writing. The main idea of this

source is effective coaching. This journal article begins by giving background on goal

focused coaching, characteristics of effective head coaches, and confidence in coaching.

To study these things, Branick recorded the coaches at the University of Dayton during

their pre-game speech, which is a good indicator of how the coach communicates with

the team as well as the type of rhetoric that is being used. The conclusion is that

coaching requires the use of multiple literacies. Multiple literacies are explained by

Branick as: “not just reading and writing but things such as reading people.”.

This article relates to the other articles in my annotated bibliography because it is

focused completely around coaching which my other articles are also examining. It is

relevant to my research because it gives thorough background information on factors that

influence coaching such as setting, personnel, and goals. Since the article is about

coaching, it relates perfectly to my research question which is looking at the rhetoric that

professional coaches use. I will use this in my research to guide me in what kinds of

things to look at when watching coaches in action, which is much different than in

interviews.

Downs, D. (2019) Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning-Making. Writing

about Writing. The main point of this article is to guide the audience through an

explanation of many of the rhetorical principles that we use. The article begins by

defining rhetoric and discusses other principles and concepts that are important to
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writing. This is significant to the research question since my research is examining the

rhetoric and rhetorical principles used in my discourse community.

This article relates well to the other framework piece by Johns (2019). Johns

(2019) piece is about discourse communities, which this research project is centered

around. Together, these two articles provide a solid foundation for the research that has

been done. This article also relates to the six other secondary sources because all of them

must be related back to writing and rhetoric for the purpose of the research project. For

the articles that are not specifically talking about rhetoric or discourse communities, these

two articles can be used as a guideline. This was one strategy that was used in the coding

chart which is part of the Researched Article.

Ehrenworth, M., Minor, C., Federman, M., Jennings, J., Messer, K., & McCloud, C. (2015).

Those Who Can Coach Can Teach: Collaborating with Athletic Coaches to Raise the

Level of Students’ Close Reading, Argumentation Skills, and Academic Agency. Journal

of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(1), 15-20. Retrieved March 1, 2020, from

www.jstor.org/stable/44011211. The main idea of this source is that coaches have

valuable and unique characteristics that make them very good teachers in the classroom.

The article includes many studies and examines four main points, which are close reading

with coach teachers, harnessing argumentation moves, articulating vision, and coaches’

feedback. The first study focusing on coaches as teachers found that it helps students to

get feedback from coaches, especially positive and constructive feedback. Coaches were

also found to greatly increased the self-esteem of students in the classroom in the second

group of studies concerning harnessing argumentation moves. The section focusing on

articulating vision found through a study on students that they will do better if they know
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exactly what they are doing and why. As a coach, you are responsible for giving the

players a clear vision of what the goals are for the team. In the final study, the feedback

processes was studied and found that immediate feedback is much more effective than

feedback that occurs later on. Applying this to coaching, the urgency with which you

give players feedback and the quality of that feedback is very important.

This article relates to the Manfred and Branick articles in my annotated

bibliography because they all discuss the topic of coaches as teachers. While the others

do not test how coaches can affect students in the classroom, this article aims to prove

that coaches are in fact, good teachers. This article relates to my research question

because it gives more insight into the types of things that good coaches do. It also shows

that there is a relationship between coaching and teaching.

Johns, Ann M. (1997). Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership,

Conflict, and Diversity. Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies.

Cambridge UP. The purpose of this article is to gain background knowledge about

discourse communities. In this article, Johns talks about what a discourse community is,

explaining that they “focus on texts and language, the genres and lexis that enable

member to maintain their goals, maintain membership and communicate efficiently.”

(Johns, 1997) The article then goes on to look at different types of discourse communities

such as professional and academic discourse communities. Johns also examines different

factors that make a discourse community what it is and what being a member of one

means and entails.

This article relates to the other articles that I have chosen because since I am

examining a discourse community, the information in this article will be applied to the
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articles I am reading to make sure that they fit within my discourse community. It also

relates to the other articles well because the factors that make discourse communities will

be examined within all of the primary sources. This is relevant to my research question

because it provides background knowledge about discourse communities, which this

research is centered around. It explains what to look for within a discourse community

and much of what there is to look for is based on the language and communication within

the discourse community.