Abstract
Twenty years ago, a Ministerial Taskforce on Sport, Fitness and Leisure was established to examine the structure of New Zealand sport. One outcome of this taskforce was the publication of two policy documents: The New Zealand Coaching Strategy and the Coach Development Framework (CDF). In 2010 Cassidy and Kidman examined the influence these two documents had on the sports coaching environments in Aotearoa New Zealand and noted there had been, to varying degrees, a paradigmatic shift. They concluded that “the next step is to see how this policy document [CDF] is being ‘tried and tested’ or ‘used’ in the field”. The aim of this chapter is to examine some of these “next steps”, specifically how subsequent policy documents and initiatives, informed by an athlete-centred philosophy, have had implications for all stakeholders in the sports coaching ecology in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is no debate that this work has been, and continues to be, contested terrain. This was illustrated by Sport New Zealand’s statement that “it will not force changes on sports and it could take a generation for people to fully support [the] changes….The leaders had to buy into the changes and then work it through the volunteers”.