Introduction: As part of a broader and longitudinal analysis of professional socialisation of coaches in football (soccer) the perceptions held by coaches at differing levels of experience (neophyte and senior) were examined using Kelly`s (1955) Repgrid methodology. The term "professional socialisation" is meant to refer to the various influences that impact upon an individual`s professional development. "It is primarily involved with the growth and change in one`s thoughts, feeling, attitudes and spirit as a professional" (Pitney, Isley and Rintala, 2002, p. 1). Professional socialisation is a subset of occupational socialisation and the vast majority of research in this area has ignored sport and the development of professional sport coaches in particular. Consequently the present study will outline the perceptions held by one experienced professional football coach (i.e. one who have been organisationally socialised) and future work comparing these perceptions with those held by young players and neophyte coaches whose socialisation can be considered to have taken place at the anticipatory level will be reported at a later date. Methods: The study used Kelly`s (1955) Repertory Grid (Repgrid) approach to collect data. The version adopted was the triadic elicitation one in which each participant was asked to describe (construct in Kellian terminology) how two coaches in the group (elements) differed from a third, in some meaningful way. Once this had been completed all other coaches were then assessed on a 1-5 scale in terms of the generated construct. Once this had been completed another set of randomised triads were assessed in the same way using a different construct. This continued until approximately ten constructs, together with their contrasts had been derived. The date were analysed using the Gaines and Shaw (2005) Rep IV software package. Results: Only one example (of the many available with the Gaines and Shaw (2005) software package) will be given here. The PRINCOM analysis is a principle component analysis of the data. The axes are generated to enable a diagrammatic display of the elements and constructs together, which is not possible with a simple cluster analysis. The axes are essentially derived from the two major components and in this case account for 86.25% of the variance. Discussion / Conclusions: It is readily apparent that this senior coach has a very positive, holistic, approach to coaching in that his major perceptions were to do with being able to manipulate positively, not being aggressive and being approachable. This was further supported by having the second component largely consisting of the construct, success at the highest level. These two components make up 86.58% of his perceptions of coaching and further evidence of such perceptions will be undertaken to ascertain the generality of such a finding as the import of such is extremely important in terms of the training of future coaches. The degree to which such perceptions are similar to both other senior coaches and new (neophyte) coaches will be the subject of future reports.
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