As I’ve mentioned before, I am lucky enough to be on the Coach Developer Course delivered by Sport Ireland and the Coach Developer Developer, James Doran (from Cricket Ireland). Over the course of five in-person weekends, you are brought through a series of workshops and tasks that expose you, as a budding coach developer, tools to help you develop coaches in your own sport. Even as someone who runs “Train the Trainer” sessions professionally, I learned a ton and was introduced to techniques and tools to use, as well as reminded of ones I may have let go stale.
Bringing these tools to workshops and programs you run with your coaches to educate them aren’t necessarily sport-specific, so Sport Ireland have set up a structure that looks something like this:
On Volleyball Coaches and Trainers, the only reason I’m still on Facebook (and maybe Io sto a casa e parlo di pallavolo now), someone recently asked about training for coaches, and is it worth it. In the comments there have been a few mentions of the old CAP system in the US (which was excellent), Gold Medal Squared, and the Art of Coaching, but it did make me realize how lucky I really was. There has been a lot of thought and care put into the development of coaches across all sports here, and the support has been amazing.
I’ve finished the classroom portion (sort of) of the course, and now have some tasks to complete for Volleyball Ireland
Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some of the sections from my reflection journal, where we were meant to digest the topics we covered in each week.
It was quite the range, but the number 1 takeaway from the course for coach developers is to “get the coaches coaching.”
They’ll get a lot more of applying skills than they will from lengthy lectures, so help the coaches learn best by doing, and gain the skill of effective feedback and debriefing to supercharge the learning. Hopefully you’ll find it useful in your own coaching and coach development, if you’re in that position.
And if you’re from another country, what does the practice look like in your country now?
I’ve been out of the US for a while since we moved to Ireland, but my last few years there were running a site for the US Youth Volleyball League, where we had to develop parents into coaches each and every session. I loved that model and it was brilliant to hear from parents who had never coached their kids in anything how the experience was so valuable for them.