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Excellence is a quality many coaches aspire to attain. Yet, few take the time to think about it in much detail. This discrepancy may be because excellence can appear like a somewhat mysterious quality, with most people able to intuitively recognise when they see it but simultaneously find it hard to explain what it is, how it functions, or how it is attained. In sports coaching, excellence is a subjective quality indicating an exceptionally good ability within a particular context or domain. It is typically viewed as the culmination of a coach's competencies (e.g., coaching skills, attributes, knowledge, and experience) and their capacity to apply these competencies to their work. Although this description provides a good indication of what excellence might look like in sports coaching contexts, it does not shed much light on how it operates or how a coach might go about attaining it. In
the quote above, and the Aristotelian perspective more broadly, excellence is
viewed as an attribute forged over time through the quality of one's action.
Positively, this perspective portrays excellence as something that can be
pursued, developed, and attained by acting the right way every day until the
production of exceptionally good work becomes habitual. Given
that the attainment of excellence varies between sporting contexts (e.g.,
performance or participation level junior and senior sports), assigning an
objective threshold for attainment is likely not feasible. Instead, coaches may
be better served to adopt a mindset towards "being and becoming"
excellent in what they do by acting to the best of their ability today (and ideally
slightly better tomorrow).
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