S&C coach education: Where's the coaching?

The demand for strength and conditioning coaches and with it S&C Coach courses are on the increase in the UK and worldwide (Dawson et al., 2013). It is recognised that S&C Coaches develop through a number of mechanisms, in a complex and non-linear fashion (De Lyon & Cushion, 2013); namely through formal, non-formal and informal mechanisms (Kuklick & Gearity, 2015; Gant & Dorgo, 2014) It has been suggested that S&C coaches need to have sport specific knowledge and coaching pedagogical knowledge (Jeffreys, 2014), other authors argue that reflection skills are also critical (Hanratty & O'Connor, 2012), alongside relationship building (Tod, Bond & Lavalllee, 2012). Radcliffe, Comfort & Spence (2017) point to the need for high quality mentorship to allow novice S&C coaches to develop, and Anderson (2016) suggested that in addition to these, coaches also need inter-personal and inter-professional communication skills. Finally Gearity (2009) concludes that S&C coaches need to know about: pedagogy, physiology, biomechanics, injury prevention & care, nutrition, speed, resistance training, sport psychology, sociology and management (p.77). With such a large remit of potential topic areas to cover, the focus of this paper was on the formal learning programmes in the UK at Postgraduate level to see what is actually being delivered. A content analysis was carried out looking at modular descriptors of each of the 21 Postgraduate degrees advertised on their respective websites. The result's demonstrated that there was a common (80%) structure for these programmes, with courses primarily being structured around sport science, a practical skills module, research methods and finally a dissertation. However, work placements were only available on 30% of the courses, and pedagogical/coaching modules only accounted for (20%) of all content. This paper discusses the implications for the development of S&C coaches in the UK, with a particular focus on pedagogy.