Mentoring in Physical Education and Sport Coaching

Mentoring in physical education and sports coaching, by Fiona Chambers, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015, 211 pp., £31.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-74578-9 “Mentoring in Physical Education and Sports Coaching” by Fiona Chambers is a welcome addition to the published literature on mentoring. The book focuses on mentoring as an educational endeavour for the teacher and the sports coach. Traditionally, academia has explored isolated contextual mentoring approaches, across a variety of domains; for example, sports coaching (Bloom, 2013; Cushion, 2006; Sawiuk, Taylor, & Groom, 2016), physical education (Fletcher, 2000; Shulman & Sato, 2006) and business (Allen & Eby, 2010; Kram, 1985; Ragins & Kram, 2007). However, Chambers brings together the principal academic and conceptual mentoring frameworks, in addition to practical, pedagogcial and cultural considerations, whilst setting a future research agenda for physical education and sports coaching scholars, in one publication. The format for “Mentoring in Physical Education and Sports Coaching” provides the reader with a broad selection of mentoring topics, in twenty chapters, within five sections: (1) Theories of mentoring, (2) Sociocultural factors and mentoring, (3) Mentoring and physical education, (4) Mentoring and sports coaching, and (5) The mentor pedagogy toolbox: An ecological system perspective