Howie Carson (PhD & PGA Pro) provides FREE access to sporting research

As part of our mission to inform and support coaching and coaches within golf, we are delighted to provide FREE access to a range of published peer reviewed journal articles written by PGA Advanced Professional Dr Howie Carson and colleagues from the Institute of Coaching and Performance (ICaP) at the University of Central Lancashire. These cover two broad areas within coaching practice, namely; technical development and coaching methodology. As such, we anticipate these to be of great interest and use to fellow Professionals. Herewith a brief overview of each area, starting with technical development.

A prominent area of Howie’s work to date, is his ongoing research addressing the challenge of changing, or refining, technique in golfers with sufficient experience that their movement patterns have become well-established, or ‘grooved’ (at both recreational and elite levels). Professionals should be aware that this research and knowledge-base is not the same as that which applies to when a golfer acquires or learns a new skill.  Indeed, it is this distinction that raises the articles here to ‘cutting edge’ status and provides a vital addition to our profession. Importantly, guidance that Howie and his colleagues offer has focused on the coach’s ability to make small changes with their golfers that are both permanent in the long-term and demonstrate robustness when performed under competitive pressure. Of course, such outcomes are not easy to achieve and require a variety of different ‘tools’ to be deployed.  As such, a range of coaching elements are introduced within the articles including practice design, psychology, sociology and biomechanics, which must be optimally blended for optimum effect.

The papers also offer a broad coverage of coach development and operation, built around the acronym, Professional Judgement and Decision Making or PJDM.  These emphasise how important ‘shades of grey’ and ‘it depends’ are to a coach; this stresses the need to tweak and refine coaching methods in an attempt to always ensure the optimum environment for the golfer. Howie and his colleagues also critically consider other related constructs, such as intuition, showing how experienced coaches can keep their coaching ‘in the zone’.

If you would like to know more about this research or related courses of study, please do not hesitate to contact Dr Howie Carson directly by email (HCarson1@uclan.ac.uk). Please note that due to copyright law some of the articles cannot be provided in their Final Published Version.  In these cases, we provide access to the next best thing, the Author Accepted Manuscript that was accepted during the peer review process.

Click here to access these resources!