What skills do sport coaches need?
Author(s)
Joseph Mills, PhD
Faculty, Master of Arts in Sport Coaching
91ɫ Sport Coaching alum, Scott Caulfield, working with a group of coaches from NSCA Japan during the annual mentorship week at the in Colorado Springs.
One thing has become increasingly clear in the sport world: coaches are important.It seems impossible for an athlete, or anyone, to develop their full potentialwithout agoodcoach.We see this inmovies(any of theStar Warscollection, for example)or even cartoonssuch asKung-fu Panda.In all of these instances, you’llsee thatcoaches, or, "wise people who develop younger ambitious people," are essential for these individuals to perform.
Today, coachinghas spread to numerousareas: business, life,sport,vocalskills, relationships, education, finance, dating, health, diet, writing, acting, dance, music,a seemingly ever-expanding list.
Within thislist, sport istheareamostof usassociatemost stronglywithcoaching. Professionalsportteams without coaches don’t exist, and it’s extremely hard to think of any world-leading athlete who hasn’t had a coach at somepoint.Inoursedentary worldwhere physical inactivityisthe fourth biggest killer of people,and sportisseen as an increasingly importantphysicalactivityto maintain health and wellbeing, coaches aremore than important.Theyarecritical.
What skillsthen,docoachesneedto develop happy, healthy, high-performing athleteswhostay in sport?Whatskillsseparate the bestcoachesfrom the rest?
You don’t have to be great at a sport to be great at coaching it.
As a result of sport’s popularity, most of us already have a strong sense oftheskills coaches need.In themovies, coachesare typicallywise, old, demanding, all-knowing, and I’m sad to note, typically white andmale.Intoday’s sports mediaandamongthemajor sports commentators, we find more of the same.
With ever-increasing pressure to win, coaches are expected to be“all-knowing”and“highly demanding”with the abilityto inspire, be hyper serious,show passion, andshoutalot.
In both instances,the people who are more “all-knowing” than othersarethought to bethe ones thathave “been there and done it”themselves. In sport, this meansthe athletes who have won the most.Their superiortechnicalplayingskillsare seen as offeringdeeper insightsasto howotherscan become skilled like them.
Of course,society’spopularbeliefsabout coaches’ skillshold some value. Many world-leading coaches and athletes, who haven’t studied coaching academically, hold these beliefs and opinions too, and of course, theycan still behugely successful.
Deeper,rigorous,andsystematicscientificexaminations(known asacademic study)however, show thatrarelyare these beliefsaseffective as we assume. As one unfortunate consequence of these limited beliefs, many potentially wonderful coaches hold themselves back, and indeed are held back by others because of the ill-judged belief that they don't have "good enough" playing skills.
So,if you worry that you can’t be a good coach because you didn’t reach the right athletic standard oryoudon’tplay the sportyou coach: don’t.You can!
Coaches guide otherpeopleto perform exceptionally complex athletic skillsto undreamt levels(alwaysin relation to others).Great athletes can still make great coaches of course, butcoaching requiresfarmore thanteaching technical skills.In reality, thebest athletes aren’t necessarily the best coaches, and coaches shouldn’t let their own personal skill level hold them back.
Even great coaches don’t know all the answers.
I would argue that the most understated yet important coaching skill of allis this:
Understanding that coachingis an incredibly complex, messy, and contextual activity that shouldgrowand evolve with each athlete, team, and scenario.
This conceptmoves coaches from the “all-knowing” place they thought they neededto be,to aplace of,“Wow, there is so much I don’t know, and that’s ok.”
This may seem a subtle change, but it’squitepowerful.No one knows everything, andcoaches who believe they have to be “all-knowing”also have toconvey an illusion that they know it all already. These coaches are often defensive and far less likely to engage with new information.Thisrigidity and fixed opinion givesthem no capacity to change, which is worrying,because change is constant.
The“I-wonder-what-else”coach,in contrast,recognizes what worked for one athlete, is unlikely to work for another,because contexts change. It’s necessaryto lookfarbeyond the obvious,andway below the surface.This type of coachis opento an incredibly rich journey of new knowledgefrom all manner of sources.And even though many coaches state they arethis type, it’s shocking how coaching researchconsistently finds thatcoaching knowledgestays the same.
See what we teach to coaching students at 91ɫ by visiting our program's .
Keycoaching skillsidentified byacademics.
Identifying the skillssportscoaches needhasbeen the subject of academic scholarship for fifty years. Early studieswereonthe most successful(winning)coacheslikeJohn Wooden,the iconic basketball coach.
These studiesidentifiedthe following coachingskills:
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giving short, sharp, clearinstructions
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providingpositive feedback
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being socially supportive and considerate of athletes’ needs
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developing an environment that focusseson getting better,rather than winning
Coaches: part scientists, part artists.
As pressures to win increased,coaching research focussed on planning skills tobuildsportintoa more controlled process. Coaches were then required tolearna whole series of systematic coaching skills, or traits rather, which included the following:
| organized | rational | logical |
| deliberate | efficient | purposeful |
| coordinated | principled | progressive |
| predictable | integrated | stable |
Helpingcoacheswith theirsystematicendeavors, was the understated skill to consume and simplify volumes of information(gathered from many sciencesandlatest technologies)applied in every facet of an athlete’s life. Decisionsaround how to coach an athletecould then beasaccurate and precise aspossible,becausein sport,nothingshouldbe left to chance.
Every coach knows,however,that sport takes place in the realworld, andnotina laboratory. This meansthey need to bendthesesciences and technologiesaccordingly.So,it became common for high-performing coaches toconsider theiradvancedcoachingskills as“part-scientist/part-artist”.
Now,all theseacademiccoachingskills are of course important. However,as all sciences do, when more scientific studies aredone, more problems are found, and the sciences move on in ways that overcome those problems.
Here's the bottom line: Athletes arehumans workingtogether with other humansin the everyday real-world. They arenot robots in a lab.
Athletes change,society evolves, and the culture of sport shifts. The struggle continues toexplain these “workingtogethereveryday real-world spaces.”Therefore,the field ofcoachingisworthy of continuededucationandresearch.
Even with the best of intentions, problems still exist.Consider the followingissues:
- If coaching wereas simple as giving clear instructions and being a considerate person,every coachwould win.
- As nice as it is to make performance stable, such predictability bears no resemblance to the unpredictability that actually happens in every performance.
- If coaches control every part of their athletes’ training and lives, that becomes, well… boring!
- Allthese skills arecoachlead, which is somewhat ironic, as itistheathleteswho are the ones performing.
- Whencoachesclaimthey are artists, it’s never clearwhatthey actually mean.They only use the term“art”because they’re not awarethatsystematic explanations of the everyday real-world spaces exist.They do.Coaching skillsthenmovedfrom “art” (unknown)to “theory-guided”(known)coaching skills.
Coaching in 2021: what skills do coaches need today?
Let’s look at afardeeper, morenuanced,andcritical(looking beyond the obvious)coach skillset:
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Identifying constraints in everyday coaching practices
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Seeking unintendedproblems in typical coaching knowledge and practices
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Implementingfluid and flexible training practices that can be adapted to their athletes’ specific needs and situations
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Demonstrate acautious,critical and responsible use of data/technology
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Develop long-lasting, truly ethicaland thereforeeffective cultures
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Coachingwith a greater appreciation and awareness of how to be open-minded, inquisitive, comfortable with ambiguity, humble, collaborative, trustworthy, playful, patient, empathetic, creative, curious, courageous, confident, resilient, balanced and realistic.
If coachescanmotivate athletes totolerate pain andpush through brick walls, they should be willing tofeel just as uncomfortable (intellectually) pushing their knowledge equally hard.This means we can justify guiding coaches to challenge long-held knowledge and practices.As Socrates noted, the “unexamined” life, was not worth living. Are you up for thatchallenge, ordo you wantto leave yourhead in the sand?
The list of key coaching skills should never stop growing!
There are only a handful of coaching scholars who use these theories.Individually placed at different universities,eachof these scholarsimpact parts of the coaching programsthey teach in.In the 91ɫSport Coaching program,however,we are fortunate thatall three faculty, Dr's Gearity, Kuklick andmyself(Mills),are scholars in thistheoretical field.This enables ustocollaborate consistently across all the subjects,hence theprogram’sfocus on combining learning with actionable research in students’own communities.
As a result, theisalways identifying more coaching skills to add to theever-growing list. In fact,wehave an article currently under review in whichwehave identified anew series of key coaching skills. So stay tuned, because no doubt next year, we’ll have identified more, and will have to re-write thisarticle!
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