Sports coaches as mentors : a resource for social work service to adolescents

Abstract

The research was motivated by social workers’ need to develop additional resources to address the problems of adolescents in disadvantaged communities. The main goal was to explore mentors as a potential resource. More specifically whether sports coaches could be considered natural mentors in terms of the social support they provided to their adolescent players. The types of social support the literature ascribed to mentors were used to analyze the experiences of a sample of 10coaches and 63 adolescents drawn from six schools. The data was gathered through individual interviews with coaches and single focus groups with the adolescents. The findings suggested sports coaches were competent to provide guidance on certain moral, social and educational topics in a group mentoring situation as well as one on one mentoring to individual cases as part of a multi disciplinary team.