Understanding coach burnout as a relational process: an autoethnographic case from high-performance trampoline

This study explored how burnout was experienced, interpreted, and responded to by a trampoline coach working in a high-performance context. Adopting an autoethnographic case study design, the first author reflected on his own burnout experience through retrospective dialogic interviews and sustained reflexive engagement across an Olympic cycle. Rather than treating burnout as a discrete endpoint or acute breakdown, the analysis traced how relational responsibility, organisational expectation, contested coaching roles, and political scrutiny accumulated over time. Findings show how commitment initially experienced as meaningful became increasingly binding, narrowing interpretive flexibility and reducing perceived agency. Burnout was experienced not simply as exhaustion, but as a growing mismatch between expanding responsibility and a diminishing capacity to reconcile competing expectations. Symptoms of strain emerged gradually and were normalised within ongoing performance preparation, delaying recognition of deterioration. A disruption of routine structures during the pandemic did not initiate burnout but made the depth of accumulated strain visible. Later responses were characterised not by decisive recovery, but by partial withdrawal, boundary renegotiation, and ongoing reconfiguration of professional identity. By conceptualising burnout as a temporal and relational process of internalised responsibility within high-performance sport systems, this study contributes to a more contextually grounded understanding of coach wellbeing. The findings highlight the importance of addressing not only individual coping strategies, but also the organisational and relational conditions through which responsibility is structured and sustained in elite sport environments.