"Orienteering is a way of life": Learning from and for lifestyle sports coaching

It has been argued that the embedded subculture of orienteering fosters lifelong participation in the sport. For lifestyle sports such as orienteering, participation leads to identity (re)construction, where individuals learn and identify themselves through specific dispositions, attitudes, and skills which become integrated throughout one’s wider life experiences. However, the notion of identity transferability and subsequent learning within lifestyle sports has tended to focus solely on participants (athletes) as opposed to alternative stakeholders such as sport coaches, who have become more prominent figures following the increased professionalisation of lifestyle sports. Consequently, this chapter explores the biographical learning of orienteering coaches in the United Kingdom (UK) to conceptualise how the process of both learning and doing lifestyle sports coaching is contextually situated and historically bound within an individual’s lifecourse. As part of a collaborative research project with British Orienteering, data were collected via an online qualitative survey involving 84 orienteering coaches in the UK and analysed through a reflexive thematic analysis process. The findings demonstrate how orienteering coaches learned from and for coaching throughout their lives, which helps contribute towards an evolving epistemology of learning as a lifestyle sports coach, with tentative suggestions for coach development within these contexts proposed.