Coachtalk: The Rhetoric of College Basketball Coaches

Whether they win or lose in the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, the coaches there will follow predictable patterns in what they say after the game, according to a Wake Forest University professor. He calls it coachtalk.

"After a while, if you listen to enough coaches, you begin to think you've heard it all before," says John Llewellyn, an associate professor of communication at Wake Forest. "And the odds are, you have."

Llewellyn analyzed the professional vocabulary of NCAA Division I men's college basketball coaches for "Coachtalk," a chapter in Case Studies in Sport Communication, scheduled for release this year by Praeger Press. An expert on rhetoric, Llewellyn says there is a pattern in what winning and losing coaches say after each game that reveals an underlying respect for each other and the world of athletics.

"The scoreboard is only the beginning," he says. "Coachtalk is the language coaches use to generate hope and explain outcomes. It sustains the culture of sports."

Photo available here: http://www.wfu.edu/wfunews/2003/030603c.html