I ‘always wear[s] a collared shirt now in the afternoons’: Impression management as strategic survival for women coaches in Canadian high-performance sport

Abstract

Despite efforts to diversify Canadian high-performance sport coaching, there remains a significant underrepresentation of women coaches. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Goffman and Hochschild, this paper highlights findings from a study of a group of women sport coaches’ experiences with engaging in impression management – the process in which individuals curate and perform versions of themselves to shape how they may be perceived by others – to strategically navigate their sport workplaces in light of their underrepresentation and exclusion. Based on data from semi-structured interviews (n = 28) and the reflective diaries (n = 28) of 15 coaches (four racialized), analyzed using thematic analysis, this paper highlights the participants’ use of various impression management strategies to present themselves as credible and legitimate sport coaches and to mitigate challenges in their sport workplaces related to their gendered and racialized identities. Insights highlight how participants described this work as necessary, but emotionally and physically taxing, and often compromising their sense of authenticity. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of individuals needing to navigate (and survive) systems shaped by Whiteness and masculinity through impression management in order to survive high-performance sport leadership structures that need to be changed.

Keywords

women sport coaches racialized women impression management code-switching high-performance sport

Despite efforts to challenge and change gender inequity in sport coaching, women, and particularly racialized women, remain significantly underrepresented in such roles. For example, Canadian Women and Sport (2021) note that over 70% of head coaches for women's teams and over 96% of head coaches for men's teams are men at the Canadian university and college levels. Furthermore, according to the Coaching Association of Canada (CAC), only 19% of Canada's Olympic coaches at the Paris 2024 Games identified as women. Further, Joseph et al. (2021) found that less than 20% of Ontario University Athletics (OUA) coaches identify as racialized, with 80% of those being men, and, among those who identify as women, the majority are White.

However, in an effort to move beyond the statistics, more attention must be paid to how intersecting identities operate within the contested terrain of sport coaching to routinely reinforce White and male privilege. This is relevant for sport coaches as Whiteness is routinely held as the standard for leadership, credibility, and authority in Canadian high-performance sport institutions (Joseph et al., 2022; McKenzie et al., 2024). This paper explores how gender and race shape the lived working experiences of women sport coaches and how they manage other people's (e.g. other sport coaches, athletes, etc.) perceptions of themselves through impression management. Drawing on the work of such scholars as Goffman and Hochschild, this paper highlights how these women sport coaches engaged in impression management strategies, such as code-switching, to navigate their work as gendered and racialized sport coaches in a context (i.e. high-performance sport) contoured by under-representation, exclusion, and inequity.

Understanding impression management in sport coaching

As first conceptualized by Goffman (1959), and in keeping with his dramaturgical view of social interaction as a theatrical performance, impression management refers to the notion that individuals constantly perform on the stage of everyday life in attempts to communicate specific information to others through their performances. A defining feature of impression management is the desire to present oneself in the best possible manner to and with others in order to avoid stigma and social rejection (Farrell et al., 2020). According to Goffman, individuals use a ‘front’ to present themselves, which may differ from how they usually behave. The ‘front’ typically reinforces what is understood as proper behaviour, appearance, and manner for the participant's social role and, through performing the appropriate ‘front’, the individual projects desirable normative traits to others.

Goffman's conceptualization of impression management is seminal in sociological scholarship and has been subsequently complemented by other scholars who have critically advanced our understandings of emotions and their presentation in social interaction. For example, in building on Goffman's dramaturgical theory, Hochschild's (1983) offerings on deep- and surface-level acting well align with Goffman's conceptualization of impression management. For Hochschild, surface-level acting refers to the faking of emotions in an environment without internalizing feelings, whereas deep acting involves making, normalizing, and internalizing emotional changes in order to adapt to a specific environment. Hochschild (1983) further discusses how deep acting relates to emotional dissonance, in that deep acting often leads to alienation of one's internal feelings. Although Hochschild relates deep and surface acting (and emotional dissonance) to emotional labour – ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display [that is] sold for a wage’ (Hochschild, 1983: 7) – this paper sharpens the focus on impression management as a survival strategy for women and racialized coaches.

One such impression management strategy is code-switching. While often studied through a sociolinguistic lens, code-switching can also be understood through the lens of dramaturgical sociology, as it is a performative element of social interaction where individuals perform versions of themselves for others to create or maintain a specific impression. Code-switching can be understood more broadly as ‘adjusting one's style of speech, [and] appearance, behaviour and expression in ways that will optimize the comfort of others in exchange for fair treatment, quality service, and employment opportunities’ (McCluney et al., 2019, para. 3). Workplace researchers have long recognized that under-represented and marginalized individuals engage in code-switching to conform to workplace interpersonal dynamics. Such performances are often understood as necessary for conforming to the ‘Whiteness’ and/or ‘maleness’ of a certain situation to gain a sense of belonging (Krasas, 2018; Symons, 2021). In so doing, code-switchers risk stress, detachment, work dissatisfaction, exhaustion, and burnout by having to distance themselves from their authentic selves and personal norms (Aung and Tewogbala, 2019; Walton et al., 2015).

Several sport scholars have critically explored how sport coaches engage in impression management across a range of contexts (Britton et al., 2025; Broch, 2024; Hall et al., 2024). For example, Jones et al. (2010) discuss how athletes’ expectations of a coach's behaviour influence the coach's style and presentation of self such that coaches engage simultaneously in the work of determining athlete expectations whilst performing for athletes and trying to avoid seeming inauthentic (Jones et al., 2010). In the context of community sport coaching, Gale et al. (2023) focused on the relational nature of sport coaching work, especially on the performance of identity (i.e. impression management) when relations between participants are strained.

Potrac et al. (2021) add to this analysis of the performative work of impression management and dramaturgy in relation to the heightened competition for job contracts. Their study participants reported knowing that they were being closely observed by others and that contracts were given only to those deemed the ‘right people’, so they took every opportunity to demonstrate their social acceptability and to adapt to the social standards of their environment with other coaches, athletes, and officials. This act of hiding one's true self is reinforced in Nelson et al.'s (2024) examination of the ways in which community sport coaches used impression management to manage their own emotions. Nelson et al. (2024) unpack the concept of deceptive impression management, which they refer to as tactics that individuals use to conceal fatigue, or disguise disdain, or hide their lack of knowledge on certain subjects.

The existing scholarship on impression management in sport coaching is valuable and insightful. However, much greater attention needs to be paid to how race and gender inform impression management in sport coaching work. This paper highlights findings from a study that aimed to add to the extant dramaturgical analyses of sport coaching to consider how impression management is not just the individualized response of a sport coach, but one that is structured by deeply embedded exclusion and inequity arising from racism and sexism in the sport coaching workplace.

Highlighting the gap: impression management and intersecting sport coach identities

Minoritized individuals and groups face a multitude of discriminatory practices pertaining to access, opportunity, and treatment in sport leadership spaces (Bishop et al., 2023; Bradbury et al., 2021; Gearity et al., 2019). In Canada, few studies have explored the experiences of racialized sport coaches and of coaches’ experiences using an intersectional lens whereby attempts are made to understand how social categories are co-constituted (Joseph et al., 2022). McKenzie et al. (2024) identify a tremendous need to pay attention to how race and gender intersect in framing people’s experiences in sport. As Joseph and McKenzie (2022) note, racialized women's primary markers of identity contribute to their ‘othering’ in sport through the ‘double burden of racism and sexism’ (Borland & Bruening, 2010: 408). This is in line with findings that racialized women coaches’ sense of belonging and inclusion within sport coaching is constantly compromised due to their race, gender, and other markers of their identity (e.g. Symons, 2021). It is therefore critical to examine the specific strategies that women coaches and racialized women coaches use to navigate their sport workplaces.

Among the limited research available, scholars acknowledge that social location influences why and how coaches engage in impression management, including code-switching, to navigate their various sporting spaces (Rankin-Wright et al., 2017; Sveinson et al., 2022). According to Symons (2021), coaches who identify as racialized women expressed having to perform identity through code-switching because of feeling fearful – fear of job loss, being ‘Othered’, and/or that their concerns would not be well understood by their sport peers and administrators. A consistent theme in this small body of literature is that racialized women do not feel culturally safe or welcomed within their sporting environments; as Ratna (2018) explains, ‘being put “in” to the sport is not the same as being “of” the sport’ (p. 116). To be clear, although our focus is on the Canadian context, these patterns of exclusion – where sexism and racism operate simultaneously to marginalize women in sport – are reproduced around the world (see Borland and Bruening, 2010; Rankin-Wright et al., 2017).

These points resonate with us, given our experiences navigating the ‘vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of sameness’ (Cho et al., 2013: 787). Each author has personal experience with the ‘outsider within’ (Collins, 1986) status and has felt the need to perform in predominantly White and masculine spaces. These experiences are not unique to us, and the larger study of which these findings are a part was inspired by our desire to hear from others in sport work who similarly felt like ‘outsider[s] within’. For this part of the study, we chose to focus on how women engage in impression management in their sport coaching workplaces. In efforts to begin to address the gaps we have highlighted above, we present the findings from a qualitative study examining women and racialized sport coaches’ experiences of sport coaching as work, with particular attention to impression management.

Theory and epistemology

The findings presented are from a larger qualitative project informed by Feminist Political Economy (FPE) theory to examine the sport-work-gender nexus in high-performance sport coaching. FPE scholars foreground the intertwining axes of oppression that can differentially frame individuals’ experiences, opportunities, relations, and choices within political, economic, social, and cultural institutions (Bezanson and Luxton, 2006; Clement and Vosko, 2003). FPE's intersectional approach draws attention to how single-axis thinking underpins the organization of and social relations within many institutions, and how women's experiences are impacted by multiple axes of social division that are co-constituted and multiplicative (Crenshaw, 1989).

Epistemologically, the study adopts an interpretivist approach, where knowledge is understood as context-dependent, socially constructed, and co-produced through interaction (Crenshaw, 1989; Denzin and Lincoln, 2018; Guba and Lincoln, 1994). Meaning is not neutral but shaped by the social relations and institutional contexts in which people operate. In addition to aligning with dramaturgical analyses of behaviour, this fits with FPE and intersectionality as both situate individuals and their experiences in the broader social, political, and cultural context. FPE helped shape the development of the interview guide and analytic approach utilized in this study, as it directed our attention to how intersectionality shaped the experiences of the participants and supported an analysis that highlighted the structural conditions in which impression management was utilized by participants. To guide the analysis of the data and, as noted above, the extant literature on impression management and the presentation of oneself to others helped to illuminate the performative demands placed on the participants against the political-economic backdrop of sport coaching work in Canada.

Methods

Fifteen women high-performance sport coaches participated in the larger study. Inclusion criteria included being a Canadian high-performance woman sport coach (high-performance defined here as being at the Canadian university- and/or college-level sport or higher levels). Coaches were recruited through provincial/territorial and national sport organizations that shared our recruitment flyer and/or through snowball sampling. All 15 coaches completed two semi-structured interviews and kept a diary of their sport coaching work activities one week before their interview (Bartlett and Mulligan, 2015; Mulligan and Bartlett, 2019). Following preliminary coding, we invited all coaches to a third interview to specifically discuss their experiences of impression management and code-switching. Five coaches agreed to participate, and this paper primarily highlights the perspectives and anecdotes shared chiefly by the participants who engaged in the third interview. However, data from those participants who engaged in just two interviews will also be integrated where relevant throughout the paper, as some participants spoke to their impression management efforts in either the first or second interviews.

The five participants included four head coaches and one assistant coach, between the ages of 25 and 75 years, and each had between ten and 40 years of sport coaching experience. While efforts were made to recruit individuals with diverse positionalities across geographic locations and institutions, our participants identified as able-bodied, predominantly heterosexual, and three of the five identified as White. In short, our participants reflected the lack of diversity in the Canadian high-performance sport coaching context (cf. Joseph et al., 2021; Joseph and McKenzie, 2022). Two of five participants identified as racialized women. This limitation in itself reflects the broader representational inequities in high-performance coaching and recruitment challenges within a structurally exclusive field. Pseudonyms chosen by the participants are used throughout.

Data generation

All interviews were conducted online using Zoom, at the convenience of the participants. The five interviews focused on impression management ranged in length from 45 to 60 min. The interview guide for the third interviews was developed based on the research team's initial coding of the full data set (i.e. first and second interviews with all 15 coaches) and the work of Goffman (1959); this data set highlighted that all participants made consistent references to aspects of identity negotiation, credibility, and legitimacy. The questions asked in the third interview were focused on if/how participants engaged in impression management in their sport workplaces, how their race and/or gender influenced their impression management strategies (if used), and were probed to provide specific examples from their lived experiences. This decision to conduct a follow-up interview was grounded in the research team's interest in exploring how women coaches navigate how they are seen and perceived in high-performance sport. This section of the project also served as an independent study for the first author, who conducted the interviews. Based on the interview request, it is not surprising that all five participants reported that they engaged in impression management to navigate their sport workspaces, and they provided examples of how this was connected to their race, gender, age, and a sense of motherhood.

Data analysis and reflexivity

The digitally recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim, and transcripts were returned to participants for member checking; participants communicated that they were satisfied with how their data were portrayed in the manuscript. We further acknowledge ongoing critiques of member checking (e.g. how it may conflict with reflexive paradigms by suggesting that participants should verify the researcher's interpretations) and treated the process not as validation, but as an opportunity for participant engagement (Smith, 2018; Smith and McGannon, 2018).

Following this, our research team conducted multiple rounds of coding using Thematic Analysis (TA). Drawing on Braun and Clarke (2019, 2022), we followed their six phases of TA: familiarization with the data, initial coding, generating themes, reviewing and refining themes, defining themes and producing the final analysis. Through this, we identified three major themes and several subthemes in relation to the research objectives (cf. Braun and Clarke, 2019). Appreciating the importance of researcher reflexivity, we foregrounded ‘the act of examining [our] own assumption, belief, and judgement systems, and thinking carefully and critically about how these influence the research process’ (Jamieson et al., 2023: 1). To accomplish this, we worked individually and collectively to ensure that our interpretations of the data prioritized our participants’ voices by diligently listening to the recordings and reviewing the transcripts on a continual basis, tracking our own reflections and emotional responses to our participants’ words and perspectives, and regularly coming together to discuss both our analytic practice as well as our interpretations (as grounded in our FPE theoretical approach) of the stories we perceived as being shared by our participants. Encouraged by Braun and Clarke's (2022: 1) turn to reflexive TA, we supported each other in ‘be(com)ing..knowing [researchers]’ who ‘[strive] to “own” their perspectives (Elliott et al., 1999), both personal and theoretical, [and who are] deliberative in their decision-making, and reflexive in their practice of TA’.

In the following section, we present three key themes that emerged from the participants’ experiences. The themes reflect the ways in which participants engaged in impression management to navigate the exclusionary practices shaped by race, gender, and broader inequities in high-performance sport coaching. The first theme focuses on the individualized, internalized, and normalized nature of impression management; the second on the ways in which the women high-performance sport coaches performed to navigate the gendered sport coaching space; and finally, the heightened pressure to perform impression management experienced by some participants because of their racialized identities.

Individualized, internalized, and normalized impression management as coach work

As participants shared their experiences, their constant need to be aware of and reactive to others’ perceptions of them as a normalized feature of their work as sport coaches was apparent. They described modifying their speech or appearance to feel as though they were adequately maintaining their space, presence, and authority. They underscored how they internalized and normalized their efforts to present themselves in the best possible manner when feeling vulnerable or out of place among others because of the work conditions and workplace relations within which they were located. As Hazel (an Indigenous coach, third interview) explained: ‘Any female that I know that's starting [in coaching] feels wildly like they have this imposter syndrome, like in huge proportions, and so I know that I have been conditioned to work way harder as to like, prove that I deserve to be here’.

All the participants spoke about how they attempted to fit into their organization's sport coaching culture. For example, Hazel described engaging in ‘mimicking masculine behaviours … because [the coaching profession] is such a male-dominated area’. She reflected on her clothing choices and added that she, ‘[chose] [a] more professional style, a blazer or pants’ while coaching and how her clothing choices ‘are not always even consciously done’. Similarly, Jess (White coach, third interview) described how she ‘always wear[s] a collared shirt now in the afternoons’ when wanting to seem more dominant and professional, and that she ‘usually errs towards the side of male collared shirts because the female ones either have frills on the shoulder or they’re very gendered and parents want to see that the head coach is in charge and a lot of those traits are male’. Later in the interview, Jess also added that she felt the need to change her body language when talking to athletes’ parents, noting that ‘I stand with my chest up and my hands out to the side’ because ‘I’m female and their culture is mom stays at home, and cooks and like females are nothing. So I’m trying not be female when I’m having those conversations’. In line with Goffman's (1959) concept of expressive equipment, which he referred to as the signs and items that individuals use to convey specific impressions and manage their ‘front’ during social performances, we see Jess making specific choices about her clothing and attire in order to align with what she acknowledges as what is expected of her by others.

For other coaches, their attempts to fit in manifested through specific physical actions and emotional performances they performed to hide vulnerability and discomfort, whether emotional or physical. Connie (Asian coach, third interview) described examples of her efforts to avoid being perceived as weak when pregnant. She shared how she would physically rush and hide in the bathroom when giving herself her prescribed injections and, moreover, how she made sure to ‘smile while walking out [of the bathroom] to not seem vulnerable and unserious about [her] coaching job’. Connie's experiences underscore what Hochschild (1983) describes as deep-level acting in which one's outer performance (or, as per Goffman, one's front performance) and expressions are modified to meet the sport workplace's expectations around toughness. She also recounted being accidentally hit with a ball in the abdomen during her pregnancy, which, at the time, she brushed off because: ‘I didn’t want that to be my story as a coach. I didn't want people to feel sorry for me. I didn't want to jeopardize my position as a coach and didn't want people to feel like I shouldn't be coaching’. Put differently, the performance was influenced by how she anticipated her colleagues and others might view her vulnerability, and she engaged in deceptive impression management to convey to others strength, resilience, and commitment to coaching, despite or perhaps even in spite of her pregnancy. Connie's lived experience illuminates emotional dissonance (cf. Hochschild, 1983), as her inner state of despair diverged from her outward display. In noting that she did not want to be hit in her pregnant belly, the story of her as a coach, Connie internalized the cost of personal inauthenticity in the name of meeting others’ (mythic) expectation of a sport coach as physically, mentally, and emotionally invulnerable.

Whereas Connie engaged in forms of deceptive impression management to navigate different situations in her sport workplace, Marilyn (White coach, third interview) described using avoidance as a strategy to cope with her work environment. She described situations where, in efforts to ensure she felt safe and comfortable enough to coach, she would physically locate herself at the opposite end of the sport facility away from men coach colleagues and did not usually engage in conversation with some of her colleagues. When asked to expand on why she chose to avoid these interactions, Marilyn reported that her more transformational style of coaching was perceived in her sports workplace by men coaches as ineffective because it was more ‘feminine’ in approach and that she felt: ‘degraded a number of times and yelled at because [other male coaches] felt that I should be coaching differently’. She mentioned that she felt pressured to ‘agree with [male coaches] just to shut them up because they’d be right in my face telling [me] what should be done’. In contrast to Marilyn, Shay's (White coach, third interview) choice to perform herself differently was connected to both her age (and, in turn, the more years of experience she has as a coach) as well as the age of the athletes she works with: ‘I do not change myself as much because I’m older [now] but I definitely change [how I present myself] to be more effective based on the group I’m working with’. To be clear, Shay acknowledged that her age and years of experience reduce the compulsion to perform herself inauthentically; however, Shay's reflections do demonstrate that she still has normalized and engages in impression management to some degree to ensure she is perceived as effective by athletes.

The examples shared here underscore the significance of impression management, including code-switching, among the women sport coaches. They all speak to how these women performed certain versions of themselves to avoid stigma or social rejection or to ‘optimize the comfort of others in exchange for fair treatment, quality service, and employment opportunities’ (McCluney et al., 2019, para. 3). Moreover, they highlight how women with multiple and intersecting identities engaged in impression management in different ways. For some, this was connected primarily to their gendered identity, whereas for others, this was related to their gendered and racialized identity, or to their identity as a mother-to-be, their age, or stage of life.

Additionally, these examples highlight the normalization and internalization of such additional forms of work as part of their work as sport coaches. We argue that although individual participants may feel as though they may benefit from using these strategies, they leave unchallenged and unchanged the larger conditions that require the use of impression management strategies in the first place. In other words, it is not truly beneficial, given that such impression management work draws attention away from deeper cultural norms and institutional structures that continue to create or tolerate challenging experiences for women sport coaches. Considering Goffman's and Hochschild's perspectives, the participants performed surface-level and deep acting, as their performances were not only about changing their outer appearance through various means but also shaping their inner emotional responses by what they thought and believed was expected of them as in their role as a credible coach. This discipline and loyalty to the role and need to constantly and continuously regulate one's emotions, inner feelings and impressions meant the study participants had to carefully and steadily manage their expressions and keep appearances up, even when discomfort or feelings of alienation from their own sense of self arose.

Performing to navigate the maleness of sport coaching

The study participants engaged in impression management techniques to help fit into contexts where they otherwise felt uncomfortable or unwanted. When the participants were asked why they felt this way, they touched upon sport as contested terrain for them. The participants described many situations in their sport workplace where they did not feel like they belonged, primarily as a result of the patriarchal institution of sport coaching, the dominance of men in sport coaching, and gender-based discrimination.

In efforts to mitigate their discomfort, they engaged in a range of physical and emotional impression management tactics to individually cope with being a woman in a patriarchal context. Hazel (third interview) touched upon her own experience by stating:

I pretty frequently felt objectified by the male gaze and that made me feel like small, it made me feel like an infant, it made me feel like not the professional that I wanted to feel like. And so to like protect myself from being made to feel small and objectified and stuff, like just to wear you know like not wear tight clothes or no skin-baring clothes or things like that just to like kind of protect my own sense of who I am and to protect myself from being made to feel little.

Beyoncé (a bi-racial coach, first interview) shared a similar observation when she noted: ‘In sport, in general, all these men have a boys club, like, ‘Let's have a beer and talk [sport].’ And that's when you get into the nitty-gritty stuff, but I haven't had that opportunity to make a network [like that] in coaching’.

Marilyn (third interview) described situations where she would force herself to be in functions or situations that made her uneasy, but continued to do so to ‘fit in’ with the other coaches. She expressed that: ‘Initially in my younger years, I went to coaches’ functions [where] I would be the only female in the room and so even just doing that was uncomfortable’. She added: ‘I was confused about who I need to be because I'm surrounded by sometimes male coaches or sometimes female coaches who are trying to be like the male coaches are.]’.

Marilyn's acknowledgement of needing to tolerate discomfort in the earlier stages of her career aligned with other participants’ reflections that intentional impression management is something that they found themselves engaging in more so during their early years as coaches. When asked why this was the case, participants noted that they feel more able to be their authentic selves once their work experiences and their ability to produce successful athletes and teams spoke for themselves. This was pointedly touched upon by Hazel (third interview) who discussed the immense value of producing stellar athletes and teams: ‘If a coach is a coach that can produce a high-level athlete or can make or has had a lot of winning records, people will let them do whatever’. However, in her interview, Hazel (third interview) reflected on how the widely held belief that high-performance sport is a male space has impacted players’ perceptions of who they want to play for. She noted: ‘What it really comes down to I feel is athletes for some reason want to go play for middle aged and old men. Like a lot of people won't look at like a 30-year-old female coach and think, this person is going to give me like an elite experience and that's a flaw of our society, not of any one individual’.

Participants made clear that they still continue to engage to some degree in impression management, but that the pressures to do so lessened as they felt that they had gained more respect from colleagues, staff, and other members of their sport workplace – something made partially possible through their impression management strategies in the first place. The use of impression management strategies proved to be valuable for these participants as they initially allowed for these coaches to be accepted by others in the profession which then resulted in more time in the job, more experience working with athletes, and more opportunity to be a successful coach, which in turn helped to alleviate the need to engage in impression management in the sport workplace over time. The gendered nature of this context is not lost on the participants, as the ‘expectation that the females act [like male coaches]’ provides an entry into and more opportunities in ‘that [the high-performance] environment’ (Marilyn, third interview).

However, it is important to acknowledge that many women do not have sustained coaching careers due to a lack of opportunity and support to stay in coaching (Joseph and McKenzie, 2022), and we cannot lose sight of the fact that experience as a coach is coded as experience as a winning coach (Krahn, 2024). Success becomes its own workplace survival strategy, and this has its own implications of difficulties and obligations of additional work that individuals may need to engage in. Furthermore, in those cases where a female coach is not successful, they may have to keep up with various impression management tactics in order to, as expressed by the participants, not be vulnerable. It is critical to note that the performances were geared towards multiple audiences, in which all were viewed as the gatekeepers to acceptance and credibility in their roles. Participants made clear that the stakes in their situations were high; it was not just about fitting in and feeling included, but were attempts at keeping their credibility, avoiding marginalization, and preserving access to opportunity in spaces that are exclusionary.

The added pressure of the whiteness of sport coaching

For some participants, engaging in impression management to mitigate the risks of being a woman in a male-dominated system and profession was not sufficient in helping them feel welcomed and/or accepted in coaching; the normalized Whiteness of sport coaching required additional work from them in managing how they were perceived by others. The racialized study participants also felt that it is necessary to undertake the performance of different versions of themselves to ‘fit in’ both a male-dominated and White-dominated sporting space (Symons, 2021).

It is important to acknowledge the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ of this study, as only four of our 15 participants self-identified as non-White and those participants who identified as White did not feel that race was an issue in their sport coaching contexts; however, the data provides insight into their experiences. Specifically, when asked how different aspects of their identity affected their experiences, the responses among White study participants included: ‘The female aspect, yes. Just not, I don't I don't think that ethnicity has come into it’ (Marilyn, third interview); ‘Well, being female is definitely a detriment…. I do find that there's no assumptions made about my race. My race is not a factor’ (Jess, third interview); and when asked about racial discrimination, ‘No, not for me because I would say you know typically you always think of the White male or White females, so I've never had any situation like that [since I identify as White]’ (Shay, third interview). To be clear, in this part of the study, we asked about racial identity specifically given that there are few racialized sport coaches in high-performance sport and even fewer women who identify as racialized (Joseph et al., 2021).

The White participants’ responses were much different from those of the racialized study participants where there was much clearer discussion of the ways in which they had to confront and work around racial discrimination. In their interviews, both Connie and Hazel spoke to the weight of being a racialized coach. Connie (third interview) stated, ‘[with regard to my racial identity] I definitely feel an immense responsibility to do well in my role, to not give up the opportunity, because there aren't many people that are doing what I am doing, and I feel like I feel pressure to keep doing it and keep doing more’. She went on to mention how this was made even more challenging by the fact that she still has yet to find a mentor that she can ‘actually look up to’ or a coach that looks like her who can help guide her in her coaching journey. These sentiments were also echoed by Wonder Woman (who self-identified as Asian, first interview), who said: ‘For Asian females to get the opportunity to be at this level is supremely rare, especially in [sport]. And I was like, even if I'm going to flop it, I don't know that I'll get another opportunity to do this. I don't know. I just don't know. Right?’

When prompted about interactions with White colleagues, and if she employed certain characteristics or aspects of impression management to compensate for being a racial minority in sport coaching, Connie (third interview) answered with a strong ‘definitely’. Furthermore, she reflected upon her own experiences as an athlete, stating how her ‘first three coaches were White males’ and the ‘voice inside of [her] that doubts [herself] [as a sport coach]’ may have been internalized by the dominant White and masculine sport coaching culture and what her own coaches looked like. She specifically states: ‘Part of me feels like if I had not done the switching or presenting myself in a certain way [in a way that is in line with how White male coaches act] … would I have gotten to the level I did?’

In Hazel's (third interview) case, she encountered challenges because of her White-presenting appearance. ‘I've mostly found [my racial identity] been received positively in like kind of in a tokenizing way like: ‘Oh look at this female woman who is [Indigenous] and a coach we should ask her opinion and then it looks like we've consulted Indigenous people’, you know? Like, so sometimes tokenizing’. Additionally, Hazel also found herself carrying extra pressure to help her colleagues and players since she looks more White-presenting than others and this has created unique challenges for her. Specifically, she shared:

Unfortunately, the more Indigenous people look, the less people take them seriously. I know a lot of my friends and colleagues that are Indigenous-presenting aren't as comfortable bringing issues to authority figures because just their history of how they've been treated. For me, I'm in a position where even though you know I'm a woman and there are things about my identity that people listen to less, they listen to a White-presenting person more than they would listen to and an Indigenous-presenting person so I kind of try to make the most of that platform.

For us, these perspectives are significant as they spoke to the weight of needing ‘to make the most of [their] platform’ as racialized women coaches. The work of their surface acting possessed a certain heaviness that was not apparent in the perspectives shared by the other study participants, who were able to engage in impression management, including code-switching, around just their sexed/gendered identities rather than their sexed/gendered and racialized identities. As intersectionally-informed scholarship requires us to recognize the interconnected nature of such categories of identity as race, gender, and age, we see in our participants’ words and anecdotes overlapping and interdependent systems of disadvantage. For all the study participants, the Whiteness and maleness of sport coaching is never disrupted; it is simply performed around.

Concluding thoughts

This paper shared data on the impression management strategies study participants needed to use to mitigate the challenges they felt they were facing as women and racialized women in sport coaching. Notably, insights from the study participants highlight how the various day-to-day tactics they internalized and normalized as necessary for their survival in the sport system as working sport coaches, were also understood as undermining and/or compromising their identity as women and as racialized women (where applicable). Moreover, the requirement of female sport coaches to engage in such additional coach work heightened their risk for harm and ill health, thus making it significantly more challenging for women and racialized women to occupy meaningful space in their sport coaching workplaces.

Our participants’ experiences make clear that they were doing what they saw as their best to navigate within and through the male- and White-dominated sport system that was not created with them in mind, and yet which required them to be accepting of it. Sport coaching work is socioeconomically precarious work, as few sport coaching jobs (i.e. paid work) are available at the high-performance level (Safai and Krahn, 2024), and the number of women in such jobs is significantly less than that of men (Serpell et al., 2023). Job security in sport coaching means needing to demonstrate one's ability to produce successful athletes and teams, reinforcing a model where women sport coaches must ‘put up’ with barriers or constraints, however they can, to be able to continue to work and build a career as a sport coach (Gosai et al., 2023).

What is especially troubling about our participants’ experiences is the degree to which each participant took on impression management as necessary and inherent for them in order to be accepted in and progress through the sport coaching workplace. These efforts left a gap between their true selves and their performed selves, and engaging in regulating these selves and emotions continually led to inauthenticity. In turn, we must appreciate that it is the male- and White-dominated sport workplaces and systems within which these women coach that facilitate the individualization, internalization, and normalization of such perspectives. It is an institutional arrangement within sport workplaces that supports placing the onus of responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the female and racialized female sport coach to suppress feelings, to change behaviours and actions, to dress a different way, bear through difficult social settings, etc., in order to be considered a competent coaching professional. This is even more so the case in sport coaching, where many women fear being ‘Othered’ (whether as a woman or as a racialized woman), losing their jobs, and/or a lack of support from their sporting organization (Symons, 2021). This, in turn, continues to reproduce the idea that the current sport coaching system is functioning just fine as it is, despite documented concerns (cf. Joseph et al., 2021).

It is critical to address these unjust realities for underrepresented identities within the current sport coaching structure, as shown within our research. The findings from this study offer significant contributions for scholars examining identity, intersectionality and systems of power in high-performance sport coaching. In particular, the dramaturgical approach to exploring the experiences of women and racialized sport coaches has been especially valuable in fleshing out how individuals navigate the political economic inequities of existing sport/coaching systems that are insensitive to the realities of underrepresented individuals and groups. Future research would benefit from further exploration of performance, social expectations, and interactions, with a specific focus on impression management for different sports, levels, and through differing frameworks to analyze and understand how performances are sustained, challenged, and/or resisted.

Furthermore, this work helps deconstruct the power structures that keep Whiteness and masculinity dominant in order to create spaces in which equity can be fully achieved (Rankin-Wright et al., 2017). By centring research on the work undertaken by under-represented individuals and groups in sport coaching, the expansion of our understandings may lead to the development of structural and systemic policies and interventions that more meaningfully address gender and racial inequity within sport coaching. That said, such a hoped-for endpoint draws attention squarely to a fraught problem facing all researchers in this area – how do we respectfully and significantly centre the voices of the under-represented sport coaches when so few get in, stay in or get by in the system. The experiences and perspectives in this paper are powerful, but much more research is necessary to ensure the entry and retention of minoritized individuals in a sport coaching profession that welcomes and respects authentic selves.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to co-Investigator, Dr Michelle Donnelly, for the research support and thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Data access statement

The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethics/informed consent

This study involved human participants. Ethics was reviewed and approved by the research ethics boards of York University (certificate #e2021–235) and Brock University (certificate# 21–035 – SAFAI). Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The project was supported by seed grant funding from E-Alliance: The Gender Equity in Sport Research Hub.

ORCID iDs

Wajeeha Rasul

Alixandra Krahn

Parissa Safai

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