This book highlights the 'gritty' reality of sports coaching, inclusive of its messy, contested, humorous, self-actualising nature. The text initially offers a critical deconstruction of coaching as a socio-pedagogic endeavour, before presenting a subsequent reconstruction of how it can be done better. In being the first to provide a distinct theorisation of sports coaching, this ground-breaking book clears some of some of the conceptual fog that remains around the activity, and claims back for coaching some of the definitional rights conceded to other disciplines.