Heard that old song by the Buggles, “Video killed the Radio Star”?

We have our own version in sport – it goes “Sports science killed the coaching star, sports science killed the coaching star” - only problem is that in our version, we really did kill off all the coaches.

The world is desperate for quality sports coaches. Look at the coach education, coach development and coach training programs of most of the major sporting nations and the message is clear, “we need more coaches”. Governments and sporting organisations across the globe are throwing money at high performance coach education,training and development trying to recruit, train and retain quality coaches who are as rare as honest politicians in the world today.

So what happened to them all? Where have all the coaches gone? Why is there such a shortage of sports coaches all over the world?

We killed them with sports science!

Now before someone from the sports science community sends me yet another rude email about being a sports science “basher” – let me say I am not talking about high performance level here. At high performance level, having regular access to quality sports science and sports medicine support is a critical aspect of competition success. In professional and international level sport, sports science is vital to help athletes and coaches realise the full power of their potential. So to all you physiologists, biomechanists, nutritionists and psychologists out there, please take a deep breath, pour yourself a nice cup of tea, relax and read on.

I am talking about beginning level coaches, entry level coaches, community level coaches – coaches who just want to learn how to share their knowledge and their passion of the sport they love with some local kids. You know – the “soccer dad” who by day is an accountant but has been roped in to coaching the local under 7s because his own son plays in the team. Or the Mum who just wants to learn how to teach a group of 9 year olds how to improve their freestyle technique. Or the guy who has played rugby all his life and who now just wants to give something back to the sport by coaching the community under 11 team.

We have tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds thousands of people like this all over the world who just want to learn the basics: how to teach the core skills of the sport, a little about safety, some group management stuff and how to deal with parents. That’s what they want but….what do we throw at them????

The Sports Science based Coaching Course!

8 am Saturday morning, the XYZ Sport Coach Education Course, before session 1 on how to be a good coach, we introduce our guest presenter, a physiologist with impeccable post doctoral qualifications and innumerable research publications in refereed journals who proceeds to outline the role of phosphofructokinase in anaerobic energy production and how regular training has been suggested as potentially increasing mitochondrial volume density in rat tissue.

By the time they get to 10 am on Saturday morning, they are looking at each other thinking “what the heck has this got to do with coaching the Pleasantville Under Nine soccer team?”

And after two days of this, we say, “thanks for coming, now get out and coach”.

Let’s step back about 30 years and look how all this happened.

We needed to change. I remember how it was in the 80s. Coaching was not professional. It was an anecdotally driven industry with very little in the way of quantifiable practices, systems, methods or techniques. We had to change.

The old Eastern bloc, the Canadians, the US, Australia and others introduced coaching courses and coach education programs in the early 80s to take coaching out of the dark ages and introduce some more modern approaches through sports science, periodisation and planning, sports injury management and so on.

But….as it is with most change – we went too far. Coaching courses quickly turned from being coaching focused with a little sports science thrown in to becoming amateur sports science courses with a little coaching thrown in.

Have a look at the statistics for the number of potential sports coaches who attend beginner level coaching courses but never complete their accreditation or qualification requirements.

Have a look at the statistics for the number of sports coaches who never re-accredited or update their qualifications.

Have a look at the statistics for the number of sports coaches who never come back and progress to higher levels of accreditation / qualification.

Guess what? It is the same in every sport – in every country: they don’t come back!

Clearly we are doing something wrong.

This is the proverbial elephant in the room that every sporting system and every sporting organisation knows about. It’s time we did something about it.

How many beginner level coaches have we scared off coaching by throwing too much irrelevant and inappropriate sports science and overly complicating the whole coaching process, at too early a stage in their coaching career?

And now, some 30 years after the advent of sports science based coach education programs we are all paying the price – the result being too few quality coaches to work with kids all over the world who just want to play sport.

So what’s the solution:

1. If you want to train marines, you have to train them to be marines: We train accountants to prepare financial reports, we train doctors to save lives, we train teachers to teach, we train plumbers to fix pipes, how about we train beginner level / community level coaches to coach and stop trying to train them to be part time, amateur sports scientists;
2. Include sports science in coach education programs but ensure it is appropriate to the needs of the coaches involved. High performance level coaches working at national and international level with senior athletes – go for it – sports science, sports science and more sports science! But the guy who just wants to learn how to teach 5 year olds to kick a ball does not need any sports science at all;
3. What sports science you include in coach education should be communicated simply, in practical terms and all of it should be relevant and applicable to the coaches needs. If they want to learn about metabolic acidosis, give them a web reference or buy them a book but if the goal is to educate, train and develop coaches, the name of the game is relevance;
4. Teach sports science in a coach appropriate integrated way – not in the traditional academic, departmental, faculty style single discipline approach. Teach coaches to use sports science to solve problems and create new ideas – not just to coach and work with athletes “discipline by discipline”.

There must be a better way!

Wayne Goldsmith

© 2010, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.

Here are ten things we should be doing in the interest of helping to educate the next generation of coaches:

1. Teach coaches to listen to and understand the needs of each individual athlete they are working with. A lot has been written about Gen X and Gen Y and the one common theme that everyone has identified is the need to treat them as unique individuals. There are no more one size fits all golden rules about coaching, sports science, developing athletes……….we have to teach coaches to work with people!
2. Don’t assume all coaches want to be elite coaches. We have a tendency to design courses so that they are not an end in themself but a preparation for the next levels of the coach education pathway. As a result, we often include stuff that is not relevant to the coaches current needs. We are teaching advanced aerodynamics to people who just want to learn how to make a good model airplane. Don’t assume all coaches will be in it for life. The majority of coaches around the world are not career coaches. They are usually some poor parent who got thrown in the deep end and got forced to coach the local team because no one else had the time or knowledge to do it.
3. Teach the things that matter. Coaches do not fail because of a lack of heart rate monitors. And they do not succeed because all their athletes have a VO2 max test done every year. Coaching is about passion. About communication. About leadership. About listening. About caring. About creating the quality of confidence in young people. Who cares how many mitochondria a six year old gymnast has – they are flat out remembering to wear pants!
4. Sustainable success in sport as an athlete is about character, values and human qualities – we must base coach education on how to inspire and teach these qualities in athletes. This is so obvious but for some reason it is too hard for course designers to grasp. Too many times we base our perception of talent on physical factors – “that guy is really fast” or “wow that kid has great hands” or “that guy is really strong”. But talk to experienced coaches about what matters in the long term and they talk about attitude, passion, drive, integrity, honesty, self belief and desire. So if we all know what we want the end product to be, why aren’t we designing coach education courses to help coaches produce it?
5. Use resources and presenters which are appropriate and relevant. Who writes and presents a lot of the information we see delivered at coach education courses? National team level coaches and staff or academics recommended to us through the university system and neither group understands the needs of a local coach working with the Newport under 7 soccer team.
6. Keep courses relevant and up to date. I know some sports that still teaching entry level coaching courses which have changed little since the late 1980s. With the Internet being so widely accessible, there are no excuses for allowing courses, information, presenters or resources to become out of date. Message to coach educators – stop being lazy!
7. Scrap the competency based philosophy. Forget it. It is too un-weildy, too complex, too expensive and too confusing for anyone except for the largest sporting organisations to even contemplate introducing. Keep it simple. Assess coaches when they are coaching. We are not splitting the atom. We are just teaching kids to throw better, run faster, swim quicker and jump higher.
8. Scrap the competency based philosophy. See above. Read it three times before proceeding.
9. Spend as much time training your course presenters to be the best in the business as you do designing the courses they present! Think of the best teachers you ever had. Was it the content that made you love coming to their class? No – it was them and their unique, special way of delivering information. You can’t even remember what they taught you but they inspired something in you – they lit a fire which got you excited about learning. So the question is – do your coach educators excite coaches to learn and to be the best they can be?
10. And now the most challenging concept…don’t teach WHAT – TEACH HOW. The content of coaching courses is usually promoted to course participants a “law” – i.e. what you learn in the course is the only way to coach athletes. This has to change.If we have learnt one thing it is that there are no “laws”, no “golden rules”, no “must do”, no “always”, no “never”, no “have to” in coaching. Courses need to be less definitive and less indoctrinating and more about teaching coaches to be creative, innovative and to do it their own way. Our current methods of pulling out the old coaching manual and teaching the “law of hockey according to Hockey USA” or the “law of swimming according to the German Swimming Association” stifle creativity, limit learning and restrict the potential of the coach – and ultimately limit the performance potential of their athletes and the progress of the sport itself.

There you go. Some ideas to put creativity back into coach education.

Wayne Goldsmith

© 2009, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.

The world needs more coaches. Good coaches. Passionate coaches. Committed coaches. Innovative coaches.

Coaches.

Coaches are the driving force of change in sport and every sport needs more great coaches.

Many nations – including the UK, Canada, South Africa, France and Australia are investing in coach education, coach development, coach mentoring, coach accreditation and coaching the coaches programs.

And – as usual – instead of inventing new, exciting, innovative, creative and more importantly effective ways of educating and developing the next generation of coaches, everyone is following trends, fads and the old tried and trusted training techniques – many of which have failed over and over again all over the world.

Here are ten really dumb things we do and call it Coach Education.

1. We base coach education programs on sports science. Sports science is an important part of athlete development and effective coaching but ultimately it represents about 5% of what a coach does day to day.
2. We create athlete development pathways but then do not align the coach development pathway to them. The whole point to coaching is to create an environment which provides appropriate coaching to athletes at the appropriate time in their development. How many sports create effective athlete development pathways, then neglect to align their coach development pathway to it – i.e. so they can run parallel and complimentary to each other.
3. We believe that competency based training is the new messiah. Competency based training has promised a lot but under-delivered all over the world. The main reason it has failed is that no country and no sport has the framework or resources to train the coaches, train the assessors, ensure consistency across the national system and ensure it all maintains currency and relevance over time. The Competency based process with its laborious framework of competencies, checklists, assessment requirements and overly bureaucratic and complicated administration is too complex and unwieldy to be workable outside the vocational training industry and academic sector. More importantly, no one has been able to demonstrate that competency based coach education programs produce better coaches and athletes. Message to Coaching Education program managers all over the world – Move On!
4. We run workshops and conferences that are largely based on sports science, gimmicks, fads and short cuts. How many times do you go to a coach education workshop and have to listen to people talking about supplements, equipment, lactate analysers, heart rate monitors etc etc when the reality for most of world’s coaches is dealing with parents, dealing with the inconsistencies of teenagers, finding time to balance coaching, family and work and the more simple, practical side of coaching.
5. We give token attention to mentoring programs. Mentoring is like politics. Everyone talks about it but few understand it. Every nation with a Coach education network talks about mentoring but no one has been able to use it effectively because no one has the time or money to adequately fund and drive it.
6. We teach all coaches the same outdated periodization processes.Traditional models of periodization are like black and white TV, the Betamax video and the dinosaurs – outdated and out of place in this century. Yet we keep teaching the old favourites – one week microcycles, one month macrocycles and three month phases to every coach on the face of the earth. No wonder some sports are going no where.
7. We spend most of the alloted time teaching “what” to do and not focus on “how” and “why”. The
   “what” of coaching changes all the time. The future belongs to coaches who challenge what’s happening now and think about the how and why to find new ways of forging the frontiers of sport. Yet, all we tell them is what to do – to do what others have done before them – to repeat what worked in the past – and not how to create a new future.
8. We create courses which do not reflect where the sport is going -i.e. we present course information which is based on what worked in the distant past. Speaks for itself. The past is the past – coaching is about helping athletes achieve in the future and must be future focused.
9. We allow people to present the courses without insisting their teaching, education and communication skills are the best in the sport. The way coach education works in many countries is to allow a retired coach or even worse – a sports administrator – deliver entry level programs at local, state and provincial level – usually as a revenue raising exercise for the local administration. These guys deliver the same stuff over and over and over the same way for 20 years, then get a lifetime achievement award from the sport for their mediocrity. Unless the people doing the educating are the best of the best, how can the next generation of coaches – and athletes be any good?
10. We continue to present courses which are classroom based. How many goals are scored in a classroom? How many world records are broken in a Board room? How many touchdowns are scored in a training room? Why do we insist on making coach education classroom based?

There are ten really great ways of educating coaches – ways that can prepare them to lead their sport into a better, brighter future………………check this site again soon!!!

Wayne Goldsmith

© 2009, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.

By Wayne Goldsmith |

OK. Let’s talk about how to develop world class coaches.

Grab a piece of paper. On one side of the paper, write down the characteristics of a great coach.

Does your list include any or all of the following:

• Outstanding communicator
• Visionary
• Leader
• Innovator
• Negotiator
• Conflict resolver
• Media manager
• Public relations genius
• Team developer
• People manager
• Technical / tactical / strategic skills of the highest order
• Philosopher
• Politician
• Futurist

OK - now turn the page over and write down a list of all the coach education programs which cover the above?

Is this side of the paper blank? Yes? Then we can begin.

Every sport in every nation is trying to figure out how to develop world class coaches. Some nations are spending millions of dollars / pounds / rubles trying to fast track the development of the next generation of high performance coaches……..and in general………everyone is failing.

Why?

Because in general most coach education programs are based on sports science. And as much as I personally love sports science, it represents about 2% of the day to day life of a world class coach.

Because in general, coach education programs and systems in most countries are designed by, driven by and managed by people who have not been world class coaches or understand the real needs of world class coaches.

Because in general, the coach education programs and systems in most countries are trying to find a formula for something that has no formula: to define something that is impossible to define: uniqueness.

Think about the great coaches you have known, seen or read about. What was it about them that made them great? They were different. They were unique. They saw a different future and worked hard to get there first. They ignored the status quo and their peers saying “that’s not the way we do it” and made their own path. They did things and thought things that no one else did – that’s what gave them the edge and made them successful.

And that’s the problem. The sporting bureaucracies of some of the world’s leading sporting systems are trying to mass produce uniqueness – to institutionalise greatness – to make genius “competency based”.

So what’s the solution?

1.  Treat elite coaches the same way you treat world class athletes – as unique, individuals with real genius and a special talent.
2. Provide individualised development opportunities based on the specific needs of each coach – give them a program that is not a program in the traditional sense – but a pathway that enhances their uniqueness and embraces their difference.
3. Give them time. No world class athlete achieves their optimum performance level in their first year of competition. Similarly, world class coaches take time to develop and realise their full potential. It is unrealistic in the extreme to expect a young coach to be the best they can be in their first year of coaching.

 Wayne Goldsmith

© 2009, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.

By Wayne Goldsmith |

I have been to hundreds of coaching courses, coaching workshops, coaching conferences and coaching seminars. Invariably, the course convener invites a guest speaker with a specialist sports science background to talk about physiology, biomechanics, nutrition, psychology or another sports performance topic.

And, in all of the hundreds of courses, workshops, conferences and seminars I have attended, I have seen the same mistakes being made by the guest speakers. So I decided to do something about it.

 The problem stems from the differences between the “two worlds” – the sports science world and the coaching world.

In the sports science world things are based on facts, research, validity and reliability measures, measurement, accuracy and evidence.

In the coaching world the key focus areas are results, performance, communication, instinct and “feel” – the art of coaching.

It is vital that the two worlds come together and share ideas and information but it just as vital that the two groups communicate appropriately and effectively. 

First seek to understand – then to be understood.

Here are the Ten Golden Rules about Presenting Sports Science Information to Coaches:

Never Apologise in advance (particularly about the presentation being too technical). Often the expert’s first words will be “Listen I am sorry about how technical this presentation will be today”. Bad move. Apologising at the beginning means you didn’t prepare properly for the audience’s needs and are just going through your standard, generic industry presentation on the topic. Do your homework.

Keep jargon down to a minimum. All industries have their share of jargon. Keep it down to a minimum. And don’t apologise for using it!

Join the PAPPP – People Against Pointless PowerPoint Presentations. We all love PowerPoint because it is the lazy, easy, convenient way to present information. It’s great when you are busy and have limited time to prepare. But..PowerPoint is beginning to outlive it’s usefulness in the coaching education area. Coaches are communicators and want to be communicated with – not “Powerpointed” at.

Following on from the PAPPP - talk to the people: not to the slides. Another major mistake is presenters talking to their slides and not to the people in the audience. The slides are an addition to the presentation – not the whole thing. They supplement your ideas and information with graphics and colour etc – but YOU are the presentation. Guess what? You can actually turn off the projector sometimes – it does have an off button- and just talk to people.

Keep background, historical information to a minimum – A real mistake. Because sports science has a convention of doing research reviews and referencing the work that has been in the past, presenters feel the need to take the coaches through the 100 year history of the topic. Coaches are not interested! Get to the point and discuss your views about what’s useful and practical now and what can enhance performance in the future.

Don’t dumb down – coaches are not dumb. Some coaches will have sports science backgrounds themselves. Others have PhD’s from 20 years of learning hard lessons and are deserving of your respect. Do not dumb down your information – frame it and present in such a way as it adds value to the coaches program.

Avoid inconclusives like “I think” - Again a legacy of the scientific world where things need to be proven to 0.05 and to reliability and validity conventions before being publicly presented. You are the expert. Present the information with confidence, certainty and strength. A coaches interpretation of “I think” is “I am not sure, I don’t really know”. It also indicates a lack of confidence in yourself and what you are saying.

Don’t defer to colleagues or people in the audience- An annoying habit that many presenters fall into. Do not defer to colleagues in the audience. Their time to present will come. What you are saying by deferring to a colleague in the audience is “I am not totally confident about this so I will get the support of someone in the audience who might know more than me”. It also shows a lack of self confidence.

Keep it to time – Everyone is passionate about their own topic and deserves equal time to present as you. Keep to time.

Spend some time becoming familiar with the specific needs of the audience – the key to it all.  A “one size fits all” presentation is not good enough. With information available so readily on the Internet there is no excuse for delivering generic presentations and only changing the title slides and date. It’s all about the needs of the audience: learn who they are, what they do, what they need and what they want to find out.

So there it is - my Ten Golden Rules for presenting sports science information to coaches.

Can’t wait to see you present sometime in the future.

Wayne Goldsmith

© 2009, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.