Written by The road to becoming a professional sports coach is a challenging one. There are many amateur sports coaches operating today without any formal qualifications. There have been, mainly in the past, some sports coaches at the highest level who have achieved outstanding results without being formally qualified. The question is, can the coaches in these two examples be labelled as professionals? How are we to know whether what they are doing is in the long term interests of the athlete – who is to say? If there is no need for an independent assessment of competence, then why do we have qualifications and professional institutions in the first place? Why not let every sports coach just do their own thing?
There are five essential and interrelated elements required to become a professional sports coach – namely, being competent in the role, having a formal recognised and respected qualification specific to that role, maintaining competence and improving skills through continued professional development, acting in an ethical manner commensurate with the development of a positive sporting culture and belonging to a recognised and respected professional institution that holds the sports coach accountable for the first four elements.
A competent sports coach can be described as a person who has sufficient technical knowledge, skill and judgement to perform their coaching role. Sufficiency relates to the level – that is, whether they are an assistant or a head coach leading a team of elite athletes. The question is, who decides on whether a sports coach can be deemed to be fully competent? It is possible for an incompetent sports coach to consider themselves competent and also appear to be so to an untrained eye. There may be serious underlying gaps that threaten the safety of athletes – so, how would we know if their athletes are at risk?
The answer is, of course, qualifications issued from a respected source usually a National Governing Body (NGB) or respected professional institution. If you were on holiday abroad and needed serious medical treatment how could you possibly know, in a limited time span, if a doctor was competent? It takes years to qualify as a doctor and, despite people like Elon Musk questioning the value of qualifications, the only way you could tell if the doctor you were seeing was competent would be to see their qualifications – their badge of credibility. The detailed appraisal of competence is complex and time consuming but should not be dismissed as unimportant.
The assessment of technical knowledge and skills relies not only on an examination of explicit conscious technical knowledge but also of the invisible aspects related to the unconscious tacit domain associated with skills and judgement. Searching questions and observations of behaviours are the only way that an independent assessor can make a serious judgement of competence. You would also, of course, want to know that the doctor you were seeing was up to date on best practice. This also applies to sports coaches who are responsible for the health and safety of their athletes. Continued Professional Development (CPD) ensures that explicit and important technical knowledge is kept up to date. Being competent, qualified and taking part in continuous development, however, does not necessarily ensure that sports coaches will behave in an ethical way.
As I stated in my previous article ‘Coach – Protect Yourself’ all sports coaches are at risk in relation to accusations of abuse. This means that a sports coach’s behavior has to be exemplary and based on a firm moral grounding. The knowledge associated with what is appropriate in language and sports coaching practices is equally, if not more important than any technical knowledge. The way a sports coach acts, what they say, and how they present themselves in terms of attire and body language are key determinants of culture. Athletes and other stakeholders judge first with their eyes and they will determine whether in their view you are professional.
The term professional, however, can be interpreted in many ways. In the early 1800s the term referred to those individuals who gained financial reward for playing or coaching sport. During the Victorian era, amateur and professional sport became increasingly distanced from each other, creating difficulties for sports’ governing bodies long into the twentieth century. Amateur sports people were seen as lovers of their game unsullied by money. These days, fortunately, there has been a reversal in terms and to be professional is to be competent, qualified, up to date, acting ethically and belonging to a recognised professional institution.
It is recognised that to be a doctor, lawyer, chartered accountant or chartered engineer to name but a few, means being accountable to an independent authority representing the profession. These professional bodies have no vested interests other than to ensure their members meet the five essentials related to being professional, as already discussed. Unlike NGBs or general sports institutions they represent roles in a specific field of activity. In essence they present, usually through designated letters, the sports coach with a means of showing their up to date competence, qualifications, and experience in a single statement.
The main strengths of a professional body reside in its independence, standards of competence and behaviours and its specific body of knowledge. The professional body can provide protection and support to their membership as well as ongoing education. Members who fail to comply with the ethical standards can be denied membership signalling to stakeholders that they are no longer deemed to be competent. The professional body provides the individual, who is a member, an independent validation of their ability to develop athletes – an essential for all open minded self-critical sports coaches.
As it has been said many times before, six months of experience repeated sixty times does not produce a professional sports coach. How then can we be certain, absolutely certain, that there are no serious gaps in our technical knowledge that are putting athletes at risk? Are sports coaches seriously uninterested in the services professional bodies have to offer? I would urge all sports coaches to become a professional in their role by addressing all five essentials – if not for you do it for your athletes.