Developing Your Coaching
"High achievers in every sphere of life are highly aware of what they want to achieve, of their own strengths and weaknesses, of the need to improve performance... they also take full responsibility for doing all they can to achieve their aims"
David Hemery, 1968 Olympic Gold Medallist
This section of the website is dedicated to coach development, and we hope that it provides you with information and tools to help you to become a high achieving coach. Click on the links below to find out more.
What is Coach Development?
Self Reflection and Coach Profiling
Training Needs Analysis
Coach Profiling Graphs
Quality Coach Checklist
Coaching Log
Mentoring Agreement Template
What is Coach Development?
"Coach Development - isn't that just going on courses?"
NO! Coach Development does include gaining qualifications & attending one-off workshops, but coaches can also develop in many other ways.
Research shows that coaches consistently report that they tend to learn most through applied coaching practice and from observing and working with other coaches. The tools provided here will help you to maximise the opportunities for development that such situations provide.
Self Reflection and Coach Profiling
In any endeavour that involves the desire to change and improve it is vital to consider three things:
- What is the current situation?
- What is the desired situation?
- What will it take to get to where you wish to be?
As coaches we are highly aware of this when it comes to our players and athletes. We will apply a great deal of time and effort to identifying their strengths and areas for improvement; defining the goals that we will work towards in both the short and longer term; and devising a plan that will help our athletes to build on their strengths, develop their weaknesses, and move them towards the achievement of their goals.
The tools contained within this section will help you to apply the same process to your coaching.
Coach Profiling Tool
Completing the Training Needs Analysis will help you to develop an action plan for developing your coaching. It encourages you to reflect on your coaching through rating your knowledge and skills across a range of coaching attributes.
Coach Profiling Graphs
Once you have completed the Training Needs Analysis you can transfer your scores to the Excel spreadsheet within Coach Profile - Graphs. Once you have done this you will be able to see how you rate yourself as a coach in the resulting graphs.
Quality Coach Checklist
An essential ingredient of performance improvement is feedback. As coaches we clearly understand this, as a significant part of our role is to provide our players and athletes with informative feedback that will help them to improve. Without feedback it can be difficult to know what to improve, how to improve and indeed whether we have improved.
As coaches our opportunities to receive such feedback are often limited to our attendance on coaching courses. We would like to encourage coaches to use the Quality Coach Checklist provided to provide feedback to, and receive feedback from, your peers. It can also be used as a tool for self-reflection on your own performance.
Coaching Log
The Coaching Log is another tool that can be used to analyse your coaching practice. It includes details of questions that you may wish to consider when seeking to improve your coaching that are designed to help you to become more aware of your coaching abilities.
Mentoring Agreement Template
Mentors can have a significant influence on the development of coaches. All of the tools provided here can be used within a mentoring relationship, and to support the mentoring process we have included a Mentoring Agreement Template. This can be used to clarify the expectations of both the coach and mentor within a mentoring relationship.
