Coach Education for The Real World.

Coach Education for The Real World.

By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * Most coach education is built around delivering content, not around what coaches - and sport actually needs. * Participation and retention are sports’ biggest problems right now - and both come down to how the experience of sport is being delivered. * The experience of sport is delivered by one group above all others: coaches. I’ll be honest with you. I’m very critical of a lot of the coach education and coach development models that exist around the world. There’s a long, dull, boring historical lecture we could pull out on why coaching courses ended up the way they are - and in many, many places around the world they are still are pretty terrible. Two hours of physiology. Two hours of biomechanics. An hour on periodisation. An hour on workout design. A bit on skill acquisition and a bit on psychology. And at the end of it - a licence, an accreditation, a qualification. But if you stopped and thought about it logically - if you looked at what’s actually happening in sport right now - you’d design coach education a very, very different way. Start with the problem, not the syllabus: In many places around the world, the number of kids actively participating in sport of any kind is under real pressure. Traditional sports that once thrived in certain countries are now seeing genuine decline. Rugby in New Zealand. Swimming in Australia. Football - yes - football - in England. We also know retention is a huge issue in most sports. When kids hit their mid-teens, life catches up with them and other more interesting, more engaging things come along. The dropout rates across so many sports is unacceptedly high. We’re struggling to grow participation. We’re struggling to hold onto the participants we’ve got. Retention is a real and pressing problem. Then you ask the obvious question. Why? We already know the answer: Why do kids take up sport? And why do they stay? Because it’s fun. Because it’s engaging. Because their friends are there. Because they’re learning. Because they’re growing. Because it’s an experience that puts a song in their heart and makes them feel like they belong. We know this. That research on this has been around for a very long time. None of it is a mystery. The only mystery is why we keep training coaches the way we do. So follow the logic: Participation is falling. Retention is a huge issue. And we know exactly what kids are looking for when they come to play sport and when they choose to stay. Which brings us to the part of the equation that changes everything. Who is responsible for delivering that experience? Who actually delivers the experience of sport to kids and families? Coaches. Coaches are the connection point between the sport and our participants - our families, our members, our customers, whatever word you want to use. Coaches are the people out there, day after day, actually delivering the experience of your sport. Club officials and volunteers play their part, no doubt about it. But ultimately, the experience of sport is delivered by coaches. Summary: So here’s the thread that should reshape how we think about coach education. We have a participation and retention crisis. We know that the sports’ experience is what draws kids in and keeps them there. And we know that coaches are the ones who deliver that experience. Which means coach education isn’t a box-ticking exercise in physiology and periodisation. It’s the single most important lever we have for the survival and growth of our sports. So why are we still building courses around content, when what sport actually needs is coaches who can deliver a brilliant memorable, fun and engaging experience? That’s the question. And it’s the one we have to answer if we’re serious about the future of our sports. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching Course: * Start from the problem, not the content. Before you design a single module, ask: What does our sport actually need from its coaches right now? Build the course backwards from participation and retention, not forwards from a list of sports-science topics. * Make “delivering a great experience” the core competency. Physiology and biomechanics have their place, but they’re supporting acts. The central skill you’re developing is a coach’s ability to create an experience kids love. Put that at the centre of the course, not the edges. * Audit your current course honestly. Take your existing coaching qualification and ask of every hour: does this help a coach connect with, engage and inspire the kids in front of them? If it doesn’t, ask why it’s taking up space that the real work of coaching should occupy. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Sports Thoughts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe [https://waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Join Your Own Team!

By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * You already know exactly how to look after an athlete - you do it every day. * The advice you give your team applies, word for word, to you. * Stop being their coach for a moment and become a member of your own squad. One of the great things about the last few years is that more and more people are talking openly about coaches’ health, coaches’ wellbeing, coaches’ mental health. Coaching and stress. Coaching and burnout. It’s brilliant that we’re finally talking about it so openly. But I’ve thought about this for a while - what does it actually mean for a coach on the ground? Because there’s so much out there. Hydration and diet. Sleep. Being sun smart if you’re outdoors in a hot climate. Some genuinely brilliant people freely sharing genuinely good information. And as a coach educator, I kept asking myself: how do I help coaches pull all of this into something simple? Something manageable? A way to think about their own health and wellbeing that doesn’t mean wading through 400 YouTube videos trying to work out what applies to them. Here’s the best way I’ve found to look at it. Become a non-playing member of your own team: Think of yourself as a non-playing member of your team. A non-competing member of your squad. Someone in your group who isn’t doing the sport or training for it - just a member of your own team. Why would I say that? Because think for a moment about the advice you give your athletes. The advice you already give every day is the advice you need: Picture it. Start of the season. Your whole squad in one room - your footballers, your swimmers, your tennis players, your rugby team. And you say, “Right. I’m going to talk to you about how to take care of yourselves.” What do you tell them? You tell them to get plenty of sleep. Go to bed early, get good quality rest. You tell them to hydrate through the day. Sure, a coffee now and again depending on their age - but plenty of clean water. You tell them to eat the right foods as much as they can. If they’re older, you tell them to manage their alcohol, especially around training and competition. You tell them to look after their mental health - to do some relaxation, some meditation, to protect their headspace. You tell them that as much as they love their sport, they should have another passion too. Something else that fills them up. And you tell them to make time for family and friends - for the people they love and who love them. As You Coach - So Shall Ye Live: Every single piece of that advice - the advice you give your athletes without even thinking - applies directly to you. To your coaching. To your career. To your life. There’s a lot out there about welfare and wellbeing, and it’s all valuable and the smart people talking about it are making the whole industry better. The more we talk about it, the better. But if you had to pull it all together into one idea, it’s this. Stop for a moment. Think about the advice you’d give your team, your athletes, even their parents, about looking after themselves - physically, mentally, emotionally, socially. And apply exactly the same standards to yourself. Summary: Think of yourself not as their coach - but as a non-playing, non-swimming, non-competing member of your own team. Then apply to yourself the very principles you already teach so well to everyone else. You’re the most experienced athlete in your own squad. You know exactly what to do. You’ve just never pointed the advice at yourself. So join your own team!!! And take care of yourself, coach. If this is the kind of coaching that makes you think, I write one like it every week. Free. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Write yourself into your own team talk. Next time you give your athletes the start-of-season wellbeing chat, write it down - and then read it back as if it were written for you. Sleep, food, water, rest, balance, people you love. Score yourself honestly against your own advice. * Pick the one you’d nag an athlete about. There’s one item on that list you’d pull an athlete aside for if they were neglecting it - the late nights, the skipped meals, the no-days-off. That’s almost certainly the one you’re neglecting yourself. Start there. * Have a passion that isn’t coaching. You tell your athletes to have another love outside their sport. Take your own advice. The guitar, the cooking, the walk, the people - the thing that fills you up when you’re not on the pool deck. Protect it like you’d protect a training session. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Know a coach who's running on empty? Send this to them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe [https://waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Stop Beating Yourself Up Coach!!!

By Wayne Goldsmth Three important messages: * You can’t change everybody - no matter how good you are. * You certainly can’t change everybody at once. * And no matter how you go about it, it takes time. I want to talk to all the coaches out there. And the message is simple. Stop beating yourself up. Stop being so hard on yourself. Stop being so demanding of yourself. Be a little bit kind to yourself. A few weeks ago I was in New Zealand talking to a young coach. I asked how coaching was going. “Yeah, it’s okay,” he said. “But it’s so frustrating.” I asked what was frustrating him. “I try my best. I do everything I can. I get here early. I think about my planning, my programming. I give this job everything I’ve got. But a lot of the kids just don’t get it. I’ve got a few who turn up and don’t try very hard, or don’t want to learn. And I find it so frustrating.” You could see it in his face. You could hear it in his voice. This poor young coach, pouring everything in and aching over the ones he couldn’t reach. My advice to him - and to you - is this. Stop beating yourself up. Three things every coach has to accept: * One. You can’t change everybody. No matter how good you are, no matter how much focus you put into your coaching, no matter how inspiring a communicator you are - you can’t change everyone. Not everyone in your team will be as enthusiastic, as passionate, as driven, as in love with the sport as you are. * Two. Even if you could, you can’t change everybody all at once. There’s no way you stand in front of 5, 10, 15, 20 athletes and have all of them suddenly, almost magically, fall in love with the sport and match your commitment and energy. It just doesn’t happen. No matter how good you are. * Three. No matter how you go about it, it takes time. It takes time. The little moments that change everything: So if you accept all that - you can’t change everyone, you can’t change them all at once, and it takes time - how do you actually go about it? Here are a few simple ideas. When you turn up to training, look around and ask yourself: Which athlete can I inspire today? Who can I lift? Who can I elevate? Which of these kids can leave here today knowing with absolute certainty that I believe in them? Maybe you walk past a skills drill and say to one athlete, “You know what, you’ve come a long way with that. I love the way you’re working at it. We’ve still got a couple of things to sharpen, but you’ve come so far. Keep at it.” Maybe there are two athletes working on something together and you say, “You two - come here. I just wanted to say, I love the way you support each other. I love the way you work hard together. Fantastic.” You might be surprised. Those little moments - five seconds, ten seconds, thirty seconds of coaching - can have an incredible effect. Because it’s not what you do in this one session. It’s the cumulative effect of coaching that way, day after day. Today I go to this athlete and say, “I believe in you.” Tomorrow it’s another. Wednesday another. Friday another. And through those tiny interventions - those little moments where you tell an athlete “I believe in you, I believe in your dreams, I believe you’re capable of amazing things” - it accumulates. And accumulates. And grows. Do the maths on patience: Aim to make a real impact on just five to ten per cent of your team each week. That’s twenty per cent in two weeks. Forty per cent in a month. And all of a sudden, in a quarter - three months - you’ve reached everyone. So don’t get frustrated. Take your time. Be patient. And whatever you do, don’t carry it away from the pool or the court or the ground. Don’t drive home beating yourself up about the ones you haven’t changed yet - because you’re never going to change everyone. Just do your best every day. Elevate. Lift. Inspire. Summary: Let everyone in your team know, with absolute certainty, how much you believe in them - and how much you believe their dreams can, and quite often do, come true. That’s the job. Not changing everyone today. Believing in everyone, a little at a time, until one day you look up and realise you reached them all. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Pick your five per cent before each session. Walk in with a target: today, who are the two or three athletes I’m going to genuinely lift? Name them in your head before training starts. Deliberate beats accidental every time. * Master the thirty-second intervention. You don’t need a long meeting to change how an athlete feels. A specific, honest “I love how you’re working at this” in passing lands harder than a team talk. Get good at the small, precise, genuine moment. * Leave the frustration at the venue. Make it a rule: you don’t take the ones you couldn’t reach home with you. Debrief them in your planning for next session if you must - but don’t let them ride home in the car with you. A coach who burns out helps no one. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne If you know a coach who is too hard on themselves, share this post today! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe [https://waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Not Good Enough

By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * At 11, 12, 13, 14 our ability to predict senior talent is nowhere near as good as we think it is. * Worshipping early physical talent is one of the great mistakes in junior sport. * Our job is to elevate kids - not shatter them. This is my first video post in a little while. I’ve been travelling and doing some other things, but we’re back to regular scheduled programming. This morning I was enjoying a lovely cup of coffee, catching up on the FIFA World Cup 2026 updates from overnight. I was listening to a young player being interviewed. He was talking about the joy of being in his national team, the joy of playing, what it meant to be at a World Cup. It was all going along beautifully. And then I heard something that almost made me throw my coffee against the wall. Judging kids we can’t yet judge: The young player said that at 12 years of age he tried to get into two junior football academies. And he was told by both - in his words - that he was not good enough. That he was never going to make it to the top. Not good enough. Not talented enough. At twelve. Now, I’m no football expert. I played as a very young kid and my kids have played, but I won’t pretend to be an authority on the game. I do, however, know something about developing young athletes. And for a parent, a coach, an administrator, an academy manager - for anyone - to look into the eyes of a 12 year old child and tell them they’re not good enough is a disgrace. It is appalling. Are some 12 year olds bigger, stronger, faster and more advanced than others? Of course they are. No doubt about it. But that does not mean every other 12 year old isn’t good enough. Here’s the thing we forget: At 12, our ability to accurately predict senior sporting talent is nowhere near as good as most people think. What we’re often seeing at that age isn’t talent at all. It’s early development. A growth spurt that came sooner. A bit more training. A birthday that fell in the right month. We do not know, at 12, who is capable of making it to the top. We simply don’t. So when you look at a child who has posters of star players on their wall, who might sleep with their football, who lies there dreaming of representing their country - and you tell them “you’re not good enough” - you’re not making an expert assessment. You’re shattering a dream based on a guess. And I’ll tell you whose dreams should be shattered. The dreams of the coaches and the people who said it to that child. If this is the kind of coaching you believe in, there's a new piece every week. The actual job: Our job is to elevate kids. Our job is to lift them, to have them believe in themselves, to believe that anything is possible. Our job as coaches is to inspire their hearts, their minds and their spirits - to know they’re capable of extraordinary things. So when are we going to stop this? When are we going to stop judging 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 year olds by their physical prowess? We have got to stop worshipping physical talent. It is overrated, and in most cases it’s a poor indicator of ultimate success. I’m so glad this kid is at the World Cup. I hope he scores a hundred thousand goals. I hope he’s greater than Ronaldo and Messi. And I hope he looks back at the people who told him he wasn’t good enough and shows them exactly what they got wrong. Summary: I’m fuming this morning, honestly. I’d have thought that by now we were all smarter. That no one, anywhere in the world, in any sport, was still telling 12 year old kids they’re not good enough. Let’s hope it’s an isolated incident. And let’s all do better. Because our job has never been to decide who won’t make it. Our job is to help every kid believe that they might. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Never pass judgement on a 12 year old’s ceiling. Catch yourself any time you’re about to write off a young athlete’s future. You are not predicting talent - you’re guessing, and the research says you’ll often be wrong. Coach the child in front of you, not the senior athlete you think you can or can’t see. * Separate “early” from “good”. When a young athlete looks a cut above, ask honestly: is this genuine ability, or just earlier development? The kid who’s ahead at 12 is often just ahead for now. Keep developing the ones who haven’t caught up yet - because many of them will. * Make “elevate every kid” your daily test. Every single day, ask yourself: how did I lift, support and inspire every athlete I coached today - not just the talented ones? That’s the job. The rest is noise. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Know a coach who needs this? Pass it on! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe [https://waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

How Great Coaches Keep Getting Better

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN: * Why most coaches stop improving after their first few years; * The four habits of coaches who keep getting better; * How to build a professional development system that actually works. The Plateau Problem: Most coaches improve rapidly in their first few years. Then they plateau. Same sessions. Same methods. Same results. It’s the old saying: It’s not ten years of experience. It’s one year of experience ten times over! They stop learning - they stop growing. They get more experience but it’s the same experience over and over, year after year. But great coaches somehow keep ahead of the game - and the opposition. They keep learning and often find ways to accelerate their rate of learning faster than their competitors to always stay one step ahead. Great coaches know this secret: You get better by getting better at getting better!!! What is it that great coaches do to ensure their learning - and their performance - is always optimal? Habit 1: Reflect Daily Five minutes after every session ask yourself these simple but powerful questions: * What worked? * What didn’t? * What will I do differently next time? The best coaches are relentless self-assessors. Or ask yourself - after every training session, every game, every event: * Did I coach at my best today? * Did I make a difference - did I change a life today? * What did I learn today that will make me a better coach tomorrow? Get into the habit of actively pursuing learning from your own coachng experiences. Habit 2: Seek Feedback Not from other coaches….but from your athletes. Ask them: * What’s helping? * What’s not? * What do you need more of? Most coaches never ask the one group of people who really know them and their coaching. It can be difficult - I know - I get it. Some athletes will be reluctant to be truthful.But greatness is not a popularity competition! That’s why it’s worth spending time building genuine, trusting, honest relationships with your athletes so that they can tell you what you NEED to know - not just what you want to hear. Habit 3: Learn Outside Your Sport The best ideas for your coaching will often come from coaches, professionals and leaders working in other sports, other industries or other disciplines. Read widely. Watch widely. Connect the dots and build the connections others don’t see. Dare to be different - by daring to learn from everywhere and everyone. Most coaches live by the adage - “to a person with a hammer, every problem is a nail” - meaning, they generally only look within their own sport for solutions to problems. It’s a big wide world out there! You can learn from countless places and limitless sources if you open your mind and heart and just look! Habit 4: Find a Mentor A mentor that is: * Someone who’s been where you want to go; * Someone who’ll challenge you; * Someone who’ll hold you accountable. You can’t see your own blind spots. Find someone who can look you in the eyes and say with honesty and directness what you need to hear. SUMMARY: Great coaches don’t become great by accident. They reflect, seek feedback, learn widely and find mentors. They are ferocious and uncompromising in their learning habits. Improvement isn’t automatic. It’s a deliberate and purposeful choice you make to focus on your own learning every day. THREE WAYS TO APPLY THIS TO YOUR COACHING: * Start a coaching journal. Spend three minutes after every session considering three things: * what worked, * what didn’t, * what I’ll change. * This week, ask three athletes for honest feedback about your coaching. Listen without defending. Accept their views without judgement. * Identify one coach from another sport that you admire and reach out. Ask for a conversation. Most will say yes. Coaches learn from coaches! Wayne Goldsmith Check out my new SPORTING PARENTS COURSE https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes RAISING ATHLETES - The Sporting Parent’s Guide to Getting It Right. You not only get a unique learning experience with videos and study guides but you get a free copy of my book THE TALENT MYTH - WHY CHARACTER BEATS GENETICS EVERYTIME! And use this CODE PARENTS2026ST at checkout to receive 25% off the price! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe [https://waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]