Has Coach Eduction changed the way you coach

Coach Education, Courtside Conversations

Did you start acting differently after your course

Making more informed in-the-moment coaching decsions

Or did you just carry on as you were

This is a conversation starter

How did the information you receive help you?

Your Challenge

Talk with your coaching friends and discuss how the coach education you have attended has helped you.

Have the experiences shaped the way you coach?

Have they become the biggest driving force in what and why you coach as you do?

Or, have they only made a fleeting, temporary impact, acting more as additional interesting information, quickly forgotten?

Here are some of the issues to be aware of, plus links to possible solutions.

How quickly did you forget or abandon

what you were shown in favour of something else?

I value Coach Eduaction

This is not an attack on coach education – it’s just to start a conversation

It’s important to have different ways of helping coaches develop and certainly, the purpose of formal Coach Education is to improve your coaching.

However, most often it’s only a short-term input. It depends on how good your memory is!

Your greater development will come afterwards, over the next few years. You must have ideas and a strategy of how to find, understand and then use all the information you find.

Most coaches will only attend 2 or at best 4 formal Badminton Coaching Qualifications.

If you have attention 3 or more, you are the exception, certainly in the UK.

If this was included, would it change how you coached

Coaches said these were missing from their coach education experiences

– what would influence or change how you coach

These headings explore why you may not substantially change the way you coach when you complete your qualification.

Look out for future post that discuss each in more detail

Future development

The honest opinions …

“I tend to coach the way I was coached, it’s easier to just repeat that, maybe that should have been challenged on the course”

“I get most of my coaching inspiration from social media, mostly Instagram. My course didn’t help me understand what I would be exposed to and consider how effective the ‘reel’ was”

The use of development using a coach developer or how to work with a mentor was not discussed or encouraged.

Neither was the importance and influence of your coaching network.

Maybe helping coaches to become aware of the dangers of innovating (creating ‘new’ ways of coaching) would be an interesting topic.

The content of qualifications

Nearly all of the content focused on Technical competencies, some on Tactical ideas. More practical examples of Tactical practices were requested.

Coaches wanted more practical information about how to make coaching decisions/choices/ considerations.

The ‘how and what’ to coach was explained, but in a general style, not specific to a player development standard.

Some coaches said that they heard terms such as ‘scaffolding’, & ‘constraints’, but wanted to know more.

The timescales

A difficult problem to resolve. Coaches wanted more contact hours with tutors and other coaches, but worried about cost and their availability.

Would you accept the minimum requirement of say 60 hours over 12 months?

Are 2 weekends (9am-5pm) enough to convince or provide you with reasons to change how you currently coach?

The specific context

Would you rather know more about ‘How to deliver’ than receive masses of information about ‘What to deliver’?

Helping to solve those specific questions and problems you have in every session. Asking you to create those questions yourself.

“Prevention, rather than Error Correction”

Real world contradictions

Have you experienced advice from other coaches, even Tutors that was contradictory to what you currently believe?

There are good reasons why it may be contradictory.

Most courses don’t explore the contradictions you will face when you coach.

Information is presented as ‘absolutes’, “do this but don’t do that”. Often, there is very little reasoning given, or the reasons seem to work in an isolated situation, but not in a real game or across a range of playing styles.