Mentoring Other Sports Coaches

Just recently I attended a course which was all about how to mentor other sports coaches. I was really interested in seeing how I could help other coaches develop their coaching practice. I learnt that it's not really about sport specific content in some degree because that role is for the national governing bodies course tutors to provide sport specific knowledge. The role of the mentor is to develop the coach's coaching skills and principles. The tutor explained that a top skiing coach from Wales was a mentor for Beth Tweddle's coach, who if you didn't know Beth competes for GB in gymnastics. So that was interesting in itself with totally different sports which are delivered in different seasons and environments. This highlights that the coaching principles that you pick up on national governing body and university coaching courses are universal to some degree.

A theme that ran through the course was reflection, I think reflection is crucial in coaching because you can explore into what happened and why things happened. You can learn a lot about yourself and your coaching by dissecting what you coached and how you coached it. The tutor added, to get the best out of the mentee it is important that you don't spoon feed them, you allow them time and the opportunity to ask questions about their own practice. Other ways that the mentor can help the sports coach is observing their practice, the mentor would agree with the coach when the observation is going to take place. The mentor would arrange a meeting to provide feedback, the tutor explained that it is important how you feedback to the coach. He suggested the sandwich method, (praise, possible improvement, praise) all coaches use this when working with athletes but sometimes you don't give the method any thought when working with adults. 

I found the course really helpful and interesting because I want to help other coaches develop and share my passion for coaching. The other attendees were a bit curious why I was on the course, this was in terms of my age but they were impressed with my experience and my knowledge that I have gained over a 4 year period. This led to a discussion on mentors being younger than the mentee, how it's nothing to do with age but experience. Age can be an advantage in terms of life experience however, it comes down to coaching experiences and the ability to guide and allow the coach to use their intrinsic feedback to reflect on their sessions. Finally, the course looked into looking how the coach learns and this looked at the VARK method, The acronym VARK stands for Visual, Audio, Read/write, and Kinaesthetic. As a mentor the coach's learning style should be considered as this can have a massive impact on their ability to learn. 

In conclusion, the course was really intriguing and has given me some pointers and guidance on how I can be an effective mentor. I strongly recommend the course to people who are interested in mentoring other sports coaches. The course is well run and is great value, in some cases it's free for club mark accredited clubs. For more information look on the Sports Coach UK website. 

@dannymaynard92

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