Sports Coaching 2030 Coaching Kids in the era of Robots, Drones, Screens and Clouds.
By Wayne Goldsmith
Welcome to the Year 2030. I am your Sports Coaching Learning Experience Creator, Wayne Goldsmith, and I will be implanting some new ideas about coaching into your learning input device for insertion into your enhanced brain module. Please switch your learning input device to the optimal engagement setting and let’s begin. Before we look at the Future – Let’s Take a Quick Look at Coaching in the Past. In the 1970s coaching was very much about anecdotes and “passit-down” sporting knowledge. Coaches and athletes were the custodians of most of their sport’s knowledge about training and competition, which they’d gained through first-hand experiential learning. In the 80s, following the establishment of the Australian Coaching Council, coach education became more organised, structured and formalised with the
introduction and expansion of the “Levels” system and the National Coaching Accreditation Scheme. The “linear and levels” coach education model was focused primarily on the science of coaching with coaching courses built around the fundamentals of physiology, biomechanics, psychology, nutrition and skill acquisition, all bound within the theoretical framework of “Periodisation”. The system and philosophy of “linear and levels learning” continued largely unchanged over the next 30 years and is still the default coach education model in most of the sporting organisations in Australia and around the world. Increasingly in recent years government sporting bodies and national sporting organisations have sought to adapt, evolve and change their coach education and development strategies to be more flexible, dynamic, individualised and responsive to the specific needs of a rapidly changing coaching workforce.
Where is Coaching Right Now? Sports Coaching and the training, education and development of sports coaches is undergoing a revolution. Driven largely by the need to more appropriately train the coaching workforce, sports science focused, content heavy coaching courses and conferences are diminishing, progressively being replaced by learner-focused, contextually delivered coach development programs. Sporting organisations have begun to understand that coaches are the critical connection between the sport and the sport’s clients, i.e. kids and families. As such coaches are the key element of the sport’s industry workforce that need to understand how to deliver quality, engaging sports experiences.
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