No Coach, No Maximum Gain: The central role of the coach in the deliberate personal development of youth performance athletes

This study aimed to understand the role of the coach in the personal development of young athletes in a performance setting. Three major categories were identified: high expectations and demands; genuine care; and the transformational coach. The study corroborates that, in addition to the coach, the performance environment also contains features that may lead to organic or incidental positive and negative development. In this regard, it is suggested that the current debate around whether development must be explicitly or implicitly sought could be progressed by the inclusion of the overarching term ‘deliberate’. Personal development in sport may happen explicitly or implicitly, yet the evidence presented in this paper suggests that coaches should be deliberate in their attempts to foster it

The Practices and Developmental Pathways of Professional and Olympic Serial Winning Coaches

In 2011, the Innovation Group of Leading Agencies of the International Council for Coaching Excellence initiated a project aimed at supporting the identification and development of the next generation of high performance coaches. The project, entitled Serial Winning Coaches, studied the personalities, practices and developmental pathways of professional and Olympic coaches who had repeatedly achieved success at the highest level of sport. This paper is the third publication originating from this unique project. In the first paper, Mallett and Coulter (2016) focused on the development and testing of a novel multi-layered methodology in understanding a person, through a single case study of a successful Olympic coach. In the second, Mallett and Lara-Bercial (2016) applied this methodology to a large sample of Serial Winning Coaches and offered a composite account of their personality. In this third instalment, we turn the focus onto the actual practices and developmental pathways of these coaches. The composite profile of their practice emerging from the analysis revolves around four major themes: Philosophy, Vision, People and Environment. In addition, a summary of the developmental activities accessed by these coaches and their journey to success is also offered. Finally, we consider the overall findings of the project and propose the concept of Driven Benevolence as the overarching operational principle driving the actions and behaviours of this group of Serial Winning Coaches

Athlete and Coach Development in the Sevilla Club de Fútbol Youth Academy: A Values-Based Proposition

Professional youth football (soccer) academies face a number of challenges related to the contrasting and at times competing nature of their goals. Marrying long-term development of players with success in youth competitions and combining the development of young people as athletes with their growth as human beings are some examples. Professional football clubs and those tasked with leading their academies have to make key decisions as to how these challenges will be addressed. In this paper we argue that those decisions must be made based on a clearly shared philosophy and accompanying set of values. We present some of the key principles governing the work of the Sevilla Club de Fútbol Youth Academy and the rationale behind them. These principles span from developmental, methodological and pedagogical choices to the building of an internal long-term approach to coach development

Principles of effective curriculum design for sports coaches

Aimed at BEST PRACTICE strand And CONCEPTUAL ISSUES IN COACH EDUCATION theme Principles of effective curriculum design for sports coaches David Piggott and Sergio Lara-Bercial Leeds Beckett University The purpose of this paper is to introduce concepts and exemplars to assist coaches in creating effective developmental curricula. Through our research and experience in formal and non-formal coach education, it has become clear that curriculum design - and attendant tasks such as performance modelling and performance analysis - is conspicuous by its absence. Yet recent research with serial winning coaches (Mallett & Lara-Bercial, in press) and guidance from international bodies (ICCE, ASOIF & LBU, 2013) suggests that ‘developing a vision’ and long-term planning against this vision is a crucial task for head coaches in talent development and performance contexts. Through our own work as coach developers, we have conceived of curriculum design as involving three sequential steps: 1) developing a tactical, technical mental model (TTMM) of a sport; 2) developing a performance model; and, based on steps 1 and 2, 3) deriving an age/stage curriculum. The paper therefore begins with a brief review of concepts from philosophy (Suits, 1978), education (Bruner, 1977) and sport (Grehaigne, Richard & Griffin, 2005) that we have found useful in developing TTMMs. We then pick up on trends in performance modelling (e.g. the English FA’s recent ‘DNA’ project) to show how statistics and analysis can assist in developing a vision for target performance. Finally, we show how Bruner’s idea of a spiral curriculum (Bruner, 1977) can be applied, with the aid of age/stage models, to structure an effective developmental curriculum to enhance programme planning and seasonal and sessional coaching. We conclude the paper with example curricula from two different high-performance basketball programmes in England. Through these exemplars we show how the concepts have been applied in practical talent development settings. We also raise a number of issues for further research, mainly concerning the implementation of such curricula in complex environments where a number of coaches with different backgrounds are embedded in existing hierarchical relationships. References Bruner, J. (1977). The Process of Education. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Grehaigne, J., Richard, J. and Griffin, L. (2005). Teaching and Learning Team Sports and Games. London: Routledge. Mallett, C. & Lara-Bercial, S. (in press). Serial Winning Coaches: Vision, People and Environment. In Raab, Wylleman, Seiler, Elbe & Hatzigeorgiadis (Eds). Sport Psychology in Europe at the Start of the Third Millenium. London: Elsevier. ICCE, ASOIF and LBU (2013). International Sport Coaching Framework (v1.2). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics

Looking Back and Looking Around: How Athletes, Parents and Coaches See Psychosocial Development in Adolescent Performance Sport

Sport has the potential to support psychosocial development in young people. However, extant studies have tended to evaluate purpose-built interventions, leaving regular organised sport relatively overlooked. Moreover, previous work has tended to concentrated on a narrow range of outcomes. To address these gaps, we conducted a season-long ethnography of a youth perfor-mance sport club based on a novel Realist Evaluation approach [1]. We construed the club as a social intervention within a complex system of agents and structures. In this - Part 1 - account we detail the perceptions of former and current club parents, players and coaches, using them to build a set of programme theories. The resulting network of outcomes (i.e. self, emotional, social, moral and cognitive) and generative mechanisms (i.e., the attention factory, the greenhouse for growth, the personal boost, and the real-life simulator) spanning across multiple contextual layers provides a nuanced understanding of stakeholders’ views and experiences. This textured per-spective of the multi-faceted process of development provides new insights for administrators, coaches and parents to maximise the developmental properties of youth sport, and signposts new avenues for research in this are

Roots to Grow and Wings to Fly: An Ethnography of Psychosocial Development in Adolescent Performance Sport

Part 1 of this 2-paper series identified a wide and deep network of context, generative mecha-nisms and outcomes responsible for psychosocial development in a performance basketball club. In this – part 2 – study, the stakeholder’s programme theories were tested during a full-season ethnography of the same club. The findings confirm the highly individualised nature of each young person’s journey. Methodologically, immersion in the day-to-day environment generated a fine-grain analysis of the processes involved, including: i) sustained attentional focus; ii) struc-tured and unstructured skill building activities; iii) deliberate and incidental support; and iv) feelings indicating personal growth. Personal development in and through sport is thus shown to be conditional, multi-faceted, time-sensitive and idiosyncratic. The findings of this two-part study are considered to propose a model of psychosocial development in and through sport. This heuristic tool is presented to support sport psychologists, coaches, club administrators and par-ents to deliberately create and optimise developmental environments

International Sport Coaching Journal Digest

Digest contains a listing of pertinent, recent coaching and coach education articles and updates from other sources