Coaches: Health, Well-Being, and Burnout

This chapter explores the nature of the High-performance coaching context and the ways in which it can contribute to the organizational, competition, and personal stressors that High-performance coaches encounter. It discuses potential responses to stress, including coach burnout and the overall impact on coach well-being. High-performance coaching is a demanding and challenging profession, yet research has identified that High-performance coaches place their athletes’ well-being first, with only limited attention to their own well-being in their pursuit of excellence. Coaches endure constant pressure related to performance expectations, along with perennial job insecurity and the threat of funding cuts. Moreover, within the male-dominated environment of elite sport, women High-performance coaches face a number of unique challenges. This is problematic as only a small number of women invest time and effort to become High-performance coaches.