Coaching Malpractice?
A humble reflection on evidence, responsibility and the courage to ask "Why?"
Before I begin, I want to acknowledge something important.
There are many people who have spent far longer than I have studying evidence, learning science, pedagogy, psychology and human performance. There are researchers, academics and practitioners whose understanding of these fields is much deeper than my own. Even mentioning a handful of names would almost certainly invite disagreement. Someone would point out that I had omitted another influential thinker. Others would argue that one academic approaches the world through a particular philosophical lens, while another sees learning through an entirely different perspective.
That is healthy.
Knowledge advances through dialogue, challenge and debate.
So, this article is not written from a position of certainty. It is written from a position of curiosity. It is simply one coach trying to make sense of a question that has refused to leave his mind.
The question arrived unexpectedly while reading an article by Ammar A. Merhbi discussing evidence within education. The article opened with a comparison to healthcare, describing how unimaginable it would be for medical professionals to routinely adopt fashionable interventions without rigorous testing and evaluation.
Then came a single word that stopped me in my tracks.
Malpractice.
I found myself reading it again.
Malpractice.
Not poor practice.
Not ineffective practice.
Malpractice.
It made me wonder whether coaching has an equivalent.
That question has stayed with me ever since.
Coaching is not medicine…
Let's be clear from the outset.
Coaching is not medicine.
Athletes are not patients. Coaches are not doctors. Human learning is wonderfully messy, deeply contextual and impossible to reduce to a simple prescription. Unlike medicine, coaching rarely enjoys the luxury of controlled environments where one variable can be isolated from another.
Coaching will always involve judgement.
Experience matters.
Intuition matters.
Relationships matter.
Context matters.
Yet none of those realities remove our responsibility to think critically about what we do.
Perhaps they increase it.
What are we really teaching?
Coaching is often described as helping people become better.
Better performers.
Better decision-makers.
Better learners.
Better people.
If that is true, then surely one of our first responsibilities is to understand why we coach the way we do.
Not just what we do.
But why we do it.
Recently I watched a boxing session where athletes completed an intense sparring block before immediately moving onto heavy bags.
My first thought wasn't whether it looked good.
It wasn't whether it was hard enough.
It was simply this.
Why?
Why now?
Why after sparring?
What is the learning intention?
What evidence, experience or reasoning sits behind that decision?
There may be excellent answers.
Perhaps it develops technical consistency under fatigue.
Perhaps it reinforces tactical habits.
Perhaps it has been refined through years of thoughtful observation.
But unless someone asks the question, nobody really knows.
And perhaps that is the point.
The inheritance problem
Many coaching behaviours are inherited rather than examined.
"My coach did this."
"The national coach did this."
"This is how we've always trained."
"My mentor taught me."
Sometimes those practices are excellent.
Sometimes they are outdated.
Sometimes they continue simply because nobody has ever asked why.
We inherit language.
We inherit drills.
We inherit beliefs.
We inherit traditions.
None of those are wrong in themselves.
The danger comes when inheritance replaces inquiry.
When replication replaces reflection.
When tradition replaces understanding.
Because experience, valuable though it is, is not automatically evidence.
As John Dewey famously suggested, we do not learn from experience alone; we learn from reflecting on experience.
That distinction matters.
The uncomfortable word
This is where the word malpractice continued to challenge me.
Please don't misunderstand me.
I am not suggesting that every coach who lacks a research paper for every session is guilty of malpractice.
Far from it.
Nor am I suggesting that only academic research should guide coaching.
That would ignore the richness of professional judgement and lived experience.
But what if malpractice is not about making mistakes?
What if it begins when we stop questioning whether what we are doing deserves to be called good practice?
What if malpractice is not ignorance?
What if it is certainty without curiosity?
Suppose we knowingly continue to use methods that consistently fail.
Suppose we dismiss emerging evidence simply because "this is how I have always coached."
Suppose we teach coaches practices we have never properly interrogated ourselves.
Suppose we mistake confidence for competence.
At what point does professional responsibility require us to stop and ask harder questions?
That is the question I cannot escape.
Three questions I now keep returning to
Reading that article left me with three simple questions that I now find myself asking more often.
Is it relevant?
Does this genuinely meet the needs of this athlete, this coach or this team, or am I simply applying something because it worked somewhere else?
Is it rigorous?
What sits beneath this idea?
Is it built upon thoughtful experience?
Research?
Observation?
Reflection?
Or simply habit?
Does it work in the real world?
Because coaching does not happen inside laboratories.
It happens with real people, under pressure, in changing environments where every individual brings different histories, motivations and needs.
The answer may still be yes.
But at least the question has been asked.
Coach developers are not exempt
In fact, this reflection has challenged me even more as a coach developer.
If I help shape how other coaches think, then my responsibility is multiplied.
Am I helping coaches become more curious?
Or simply helping them reproduce my own preferences?
Am I encouraging critical thinking?
Or quiet compliance?
If coach developers fail to question their own assumptions, perhaps we risk creating generations of coaches who inherit ideas without ever understanding them.
Surely our role is not to provide certainty.
Surely our role is to cultivate thoughtful scepticism.
To help coaches become better thinkers rather than better imitators.
A profession worth taking seriously
One phrase has echoed in my mind ever since reading that article.
People trust us.
Athletes trust us.
Parents trust us.
Organisations trust us.
Communities trust us.
That trust is precious.
It carries responsibility.
Perhaps that is why the word malpractice resonated so deeply.
Not because I believe coaching should borrow medical terminology indiscriminately.
But because it reminds us that professions are defined not only by what they know but by the standards they hold themselves accountable to.
Maybe coaching should aspire to be known not for having all the answers but for asking better questions than anyone else.
A final reflection
I do not know whether "coaching malpractice" is the right phrase.
Perhaps some readers will reject it.
Others may feel it goes too far.
Some may think it does not go far enough.
That is perfectly acceptable.
If nothing else, I hope it encourages conversation.
Because the opposite of curiosity is not disagreement.
It is complacency.
And perhaps that is where the real danger lies.
As coaches, coach developers and leaders, we should never stop asking ourselves:
Why do I believe this?
What evidence supports it?
How do I know it helps?
What if I'm wrong?
Maybe coaching malpractice is not defined by making mistakes.
Maybe it begins the moment we stop being willing to question our own practice.
This reflection was inspired by reading Ammar A. Merhbi's Substack article, "The 'Empty Review' Dilemma: Why Education is Addicted to Unproven Pedagogies." While this article applies the concept to coaching rather than education, the original piece prompted many of the questions explored here and deserves full credit for sparking the reflection.
Original article: https://open.substack.com/pub/ammaramerhbi/p/the-empty-review-dilemma-why-education?r=63yumq&utm_medium=ios