The support young athletes get from their parents is often just as influential as that which they receive from their coaches. Wayne explores how athletes can best work with coaches and parents to create an environment that helps them to realise their potential.
The sporting parent has some incredibly important responsibilities within the “performance partnership” – i.e. coach, athlete, parent. A sporting parent, for example, is responsible for developing values like honesty, integrity, humility, courage, discipline, a sporting parent can help a child develop time management and a sporting parent can teach an athlete to be more responsible for their own behaviour. This feature article discuss sporting parents and talks about how sporting parents can help their child realise their sporting potential.
Coach education has shifted from being Content Driven to Context Relevant. Gone are the days of delivering boring, non-specific, content heavy coaching courses. Coaches are looking for smarter, more efficient and more effective ways of learning and most importantly, they are looking for information to help them coach more effectively in the coaching environment (context) they coach in. This article discusses the need for coach educators to seriously and radically change the way they deliver coach education, training and development programs.
In high performance sport, there are three groups of people. One group who think they get “it” but don’t. One group who will never get “it”. And one group who really get “it”. The trick is in understanding what “it” is. This article discusses “it” and challenges sports coaches to think about whether or not they have “it” and if not how they can get “it”.
We’ve all had “The” Talk. You know the one. The one where mum or dad or a coach or a teacher or a religious leader or a good friend looked you in the eye and told you the secret to success. Do you remember “the” talk?
It went something like this didn’t it? “You know (insert your name here). You could really be something special. If you find that one thing that you love to do and that you are passionate about, and if you believe in yourself and work hard and never give up and if you give all you have to relentlessly pursuing your dreams, nothing is impossible for you”. Remember “that” talk? Some people get “the” talk when they are just kids. Others hear it when they are teenagers. Some get to hear “the” talk as young adults while others don’t hear it until they are in their middle age. And most people get “the” talk over and over and over and over again throughout their lives as they move through school, sport, university and employment.
Quick.
Write down your own list of the top ten skills of quality coaching. What does it look like? Something like this?
You could add hundreds of skills to this list: experience, drive, initiative, the will to win, attention to detail, commitment, vision, determination, a strong work ethic…………there are as many desirable coaching skills as there are coaches.
But, in this century, there is one coaching skill to rule them all – creativity: creative coaching.
The question is…...can you teach coaches to be creative?