Building Coactive Sport Teams: From Leadership to Coaction

Building Coactive Sport Teams develops and presents an asset-focused framework to guide coaches in engaging athletes as coactors. This book provides an asset-focused, inclusive approach to involving all team members in collaborating to achieve shared goals, a process called coaction. It lays out a coaching model that cultivates athletes’ collaboration skills and increases team members’ engagement, especially among those with diverse identities, skills, and experiences in working toward shared goals.

Using storytelling and offering an interactive format, this book translates interdisciplinary scholarship into a practical step-by-step process coaches can immediately apply to their teams. Stories highlight coach and athlete coactors, providing rich insight to help readers account for power, identities, and social context while advancing team goals. Each chapter has reflection questions to guide readers in applying the ideas within their team context.

This book is key reading for coaches and students in sport management programs, college administrators, and anyone interested in leadership development and collaboration.

Jo Line, PhD is the Program Director for Community-Engaged Research and Learning and a Lecturer at Oberlin College, who has spent over a decade studying sport from a socio-cultural perspective. They are the Athletics Inclusive Climate & Belonging Senior Specialist for the nonprofit Athlete Ally, consulting with college and university athletic departments nationwide to promote LGBTQI+ inclusion in sport. They apply an intersectional approach to examine facilitators and barriers to athletes’ participation in and enjoyment of sport, with the aim of encouraging inclusive and collaborative team cultures that enable every team member to thrive. Jo’s expertise in engaging team members in coaction is informed by their personal experience navigating competitive and recreational sport environments around the world as a soft-spoken synergistic nonbinary queer white competitive distance runner, coaching NCAA Division I, NCAA Division III, USCAA, and post-collegiate competitive and recreational athletes, and their academic training in Exercise and Sport Studies and American Culture Studies. Jo is dedicated to helping coaches nurture athletes’ individual and collective capacity by encouraging athletes to identify and apply their unique strengths while working toward team goals.