This study aimed to analyze how an expert coach of Artistic Swimming (AS) has faced with her coaching activity through her long career, considering the characteristic of AS as an aesthetic sport. Analysis viewpoints include how to create the movements for the artistic swimmersʼ performance, how she trained them, what kind of support she gave to them in response to such training, and her ideal image of the artistic swimmers. An experienced coach was chosen as the subject (Coach A), who has been the coach of the Japanʼs national team and contributed greatly to training elite artistic swimmers and the development of AS. Life story interview was employed as an analysis method. The analysis of the narrative gained from the interview revealed three aspects. First, Coach A had once given passive coaching because she had felt inferior to those around her since she was an artistic swimmer until her first oversea trip as the coach of the national AS team. However, after a negative experience there, she became able to give active coaching based on a strong sense of mission. Second, at a qualifying competition for Japanʼs national team, Coach A found that the judges gave different assessment from her assumption toward the swimmersʼ performance before reviewing the viewpoint of her coaching. From then on, she became to work out strategies for branding the value of the swimmers based on the characteristics of aesthetic sports where judges from others are important and support the swimmers to enhance their awareness so that they could independently create movements. Last, Coach A pursued the performance that impresses the audience and what the judges expect of the swimmers by fully using her long coaching experience. As a result, Coach Aʼs ideal image of the artistic swimmers became ones who could perform as artists rather than athletes by breaking through the frame of her anticipation and independently expressing their movement through positive acceptance of their characteristics.
