Understanding coaches' perspectives on building trust in sport: a narrative inquiry approach

Quality relationships between coaches and their team members play an important role in promoting individual and team-level outcomes. Trust has been identified as a key feature of these quality relationships, yet little research exists examining how these trusting relationships can be built. By adopting a narrative inquiry approach, we sought to elicit coaches' stories on their (a) perceived approaches to building trust with team members (i.e. coaching staff, athletes) and (b) life experiences that shaped their approaches. We recruited 18 Canadian interuniversity coaches who engaged in semi-structured interviews which we analysed using a two-phase storyanalyst approach (thematic narrative analysis and holistic-form structural). From these conversations, we found that coaches drew from one of two context-situated narratives with regard to initial trust development: 'It needs to be given' and 'It needs to be earned'. When sharing stories about trust maintenance, however, all coaches drew upon a third context-situated narrative: 'It needs give and take'. Coaches' stories were then situated within higher-order narrative types (e.g. performance, stability). Altogether, our findings illuminate the personal and social complexities of building trust from the coach perspective, while reinforcing the importance of developing trusting relationships within sport teams.