Teaching & Coaching – Reflective Commentary

Introduction
A coaching philosophy is defined as those principles, beliefs and values that influence
behaviour and characterise how one conducts their coaching practice (Jenkins, 2010).
Having looked into additional studies by Hardman and Jones (2013), they go on to suggest
that coaching philosophy should focus on 4 concepts: ethics (what coaches think is moral),
phenomenology (thoughts on experiences as a coach), axiology (what coaches value) and
ontology (true meaning of coaching). Through my reading, it became apparent how values
and beliefs can benefit coaches with their actions, behaviours and priority setting. To me,
this emphasised how important the understanding of one’s own philosophy was to the
success of their own coaching (Martens, 2012; Burton & Raedeke, 2008). After reading the
coaching philosophies of many other coaches, I was able to slowly formulate my own
philosophy. I stress that this is a developing philosophy and not one that is set and finalised.
My coaching philosophy revolves around my passion and enjoyment in being able to share
the practical skills and knowledge I have with my pupils. I want to stress the importance of
responsibility, self-evaluation, effort and the desire to acquire new practical skills to
compete and have fun in every practice and game. I aim to facilitate these values by
creating a safe, positive and engaging learning environment that encourages athletes to
learn and develop on and off the playing field. The rest of this reflective commentary will
critically reflect on my teaching and coaching behaviours in relation to my own developing
philosophy. These will be focused around the practical sessions of the Teaching & Coaching
module I have undergone here at Loughborough University.

Safety
In our practicals, we were tasked with coming up with sessions for our peers, but we had to
act as though we were coaching children as part of a youth sports programme. As a result,
me and my two group mates had to plan and ensure that the environment we were
conducting in was safe and as risk free as possible. This also reflects on one particular aspect
of my own coaching philosophy, where I state that I want to create a “safe” learning
environment. The significance of implementing safety measures is heightened since we are
supposed to be coaching ’10-12’ year old children instead of adults. The responsibility on
me as coach to look after my pupil’s safety is paramount, as young kids can often be reckless
and unaware. Carrying out my personal research into youth sport safety measures, I came
across a list on the ‘Coaching Youth Sports’ website. This list, created by Stratton (1999),
contained some safety related legal duties required of a coach. A few of the duties that
stood out to me were: ‘use of safe and appropriate equipment’, ‘proper matching of
athletes in practices and games by size, experience and ability’ and ‘adequate supervision of
athletes’. These were aspects that my group didn’t think much about until I brought it up to
them in our session plan meetings. Essentially, we had to ensure all the equipment we
provided during our sessions were up to standard and appropriate for use, that the children
were always being monitored regardless of how we split them into groups, and that there

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was a balance of sizes, experience and ability whenever we matched pupils against each
other individually or as a team. The duty of matching children according to size also made
me realise that we needed to have equipment sizes suitable for kids of different sizes.
Despite us coaching our own peers, we still needed to tend to the differences in strength
and size between the boys and the girls. This was accomplished in various ways depending
on the topic of coaching. For instance, in athletics, we were tasked with the throwing action
and decided to use a shot-put throw as our main drill. We provided pupils with different
weighted shot-puts and asked them to use whichever they felt comfortable using. With
regards to supervision, we always made sure to split our pupils into groups no more than 3.
This ensured each one of us was always overlooking a group to supervise safe practice. In
team drills, we made sure to balance teams appropriately, making sure that there was a
balance of size and ability in each. We did have a pupil on an electronic wheelchair, which
we also took into consideration in our planning. We made sure to provide plenty of space
for the pupil to manoeuvre without causing any collisions and informed other students to be
extra aware of them when moving around. The pupils and our tutor seemed happy with our
safety measures, as we had no negative feedback with this aspect of our coaching.
Nevertheless, reflecting on our sessions, I feel like one precautionary measure we could
have taken was to ask the pupils if they had any medical conditions that we as coaches
needed to be aware of before the sessions. This awareness would have helped us
understand any limitations the pupil may have had and helped prepare us in case anything
went wrong with the pupil.

Self-Evaluation/Responsibility
Looking back on my time being coached as a child, I remember never being directly given
the answer to most of the question I had. The same concept followed with my parents. Both
my coaches and parents would always answer my questions with questions of their own.
Except these questions helped guide me towards the answer I was looking for. This is a
technique I have chosen to adopt in my own coaching. I’ve implemented this into my
philosophy as self-evaluation and responsibility. As a result, I would say I’ve adopted a more
reciprocal/problem-solving and guided discovery style of coaching over time (Woods, 2000).
Implementing this into sessions is not something that you can really plan for as you never
know what questions the pupils are going to ask you. So instead, I tried asking them to
always refer to me as a last resort. Before coming to me, to always assess themselves. Ask
themselves what they thought of their performance including what they did well, what they
could have done better and how they can go about improving their weaknesses. This gets
the children thinking, which also keeps them mentally active rather than just physically.
Their second reference point should be their fellow pupils. Engaging with other pupils can
also help them to come up with solutions they may have not been able to on their own. This
gets more students involved in the feedback process, with each learning things from one
another. An additional benefit of self-evaluation is that it places the responsibility on the
child to figure out what the solution is. Should they be successful, they are rewarded with a
sense of achievement and confidence in their ability to problem solve. I received useful

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feedback for this area of my coaching, having been told that this style is not useful for every
learning scenario. This is mainly due to the additional time it takes for the pupil to go about
finding the solution. I tried applying this style whenever I could, which often lead to a lot of
time wasted in the session. It was suggested that for simple matters, a quick question
around the room for the answer might be more efficient than having the pupil go away and
figure things out on their own or with a friend. Being more selective with this style will be
something I work on for future coaching sessions.

Engaging
Having the children engaged with our sessions was an aspect that me and my group
discussed thoroughly for each session we conducted. In my coaching philosophy, I mention
that I want to create an ‘engaging learning environment’ to facilitate learning and
development for my pupils. This is important as children can often feel left out or
uninterested if left to do nothing for periods of time. Reading an article on UK Coaching’s
website on ‘Developmentally Appropriate Sport’, they mention that it is important to
remember that children are not ‘mini-adults’ and that ‘children’s minds and bodies work
differently from adults’. This reinforced the idea that we had to keep in mind characteristics
like them losing focus easily if the session was not engaging or interesting. To avoid this, we
tried to split the pupils into smaller groups to ensure everybody had something to do from
feedback observation to carrying out various aspects of a drill. Additionally, students who
we felt had more experience and ability were given coaching roles within their groups to
help demonstrate the correct way to carry out the drills we had set out. These students are
challenged with correctly teaching their fellow pupils, with also relates to the value of
developing their responsibility, which is part of my coaching philosophy. In our earlier
sessions, we were told to use the student coach role for the more experienced student as
we observed a lack of enthusiasm from them due to them picking up the drills quickly.
Implementing this later definitely showed a significant improvement in their engagement as
they seemed to look forward to picking up the drills to be able to move on to the role of
coach and leader themselves. This is similar to one of the key influences behind my coaching
philosophy, where I stated earlier that it was the “enjoyment in being able to share the
practical skills and knowledge I have with my pupils”.

Fun/Positive
As a child, I remember looking forward to my sessions as I always found they made me
happy and improved my mood regardless of how I felt before the session. This is still the
case for me as an adult, as sports takes me away from the other stresses of life. I wanted my
sessions to have the same effect on my pupils, as I felt it important for me to provide the
children with the opportunity to be part of something they could always look forward to.
Therefore, I wanted to implement fun and positivity in my coaching philosophy. In fact,
studies show that children place more importance on ‘having fun’ compared to ‘winning’
(Hedstrom & Gould, 2004). These children defined ‘fun’ as being ‘part of a team,

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experiencing success, and having an encouraging coach’ (Tuffey & Medbery, 2006). Having
read this, I suggested that we incorporate a lot of team-centric activities to facilitate the
feeling of contributing and being part of a team. This ranged from teams of 3 people to
larger teams of 12. To provide the opportunity to experience success, we tried to reinforce
the positives as much as possible. Providing these kids with this positive reinforcement
made them significantly more excited. Their faces would light up and they would cheer
louder. Praising them with simple phrases like “good Job” or “great work there” helped
contribute to the positive atmosphere that we created. Additionally, with children who may
not have been as successful, we tried to redirect their negatives to reinforce the idea that
the effort was what truly mattered. Doing this decreased the emotional effect of failure on
them, and instead increased their desire to continue learning the skill. This is all I could have
asked for as it perfectly matches my coaching philosophy, where effort is valued and the
drive to learn is emphasised.

Conclusion
To conclude, I would say that my behaviour in my coaching sessions strongly adhered to the
developing philosophy that I created. Breaking down my philosophy into individual values
created clear targets for me to achieve out of my sessions. This made planning for the
sessions a lot more focused, which allowed me to hit every value in some way or form
throughout my sessions. Feedback from my tutor and peers was taken on board and
implemented to improve future sessions. This ultimately made my coaching more efficient
and helped improve the extent to which my sessions embodied my own coaching
philosophy.

[Word Count: 1986]

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Reference List:
Burton, D. and Raedeke, T. (2008). Short Book Review: Sport Psychology for
Coaches. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 3(2), pp.291-292.
Children more susceptible to sport injuries than adults?. (n.d.). [ebook] RCGA, pp.116-
117. Available at: http://rcga.org/_uploads/documents/L2P/EN/pg_116-
117_Are%20children%20more%20susceptible%20to%20sport%20injuries%20than%
20adults_.pdf [Accessed 18 May 2019].
Hardman, A. & Jones, C. (2013). ‘Philosophy for coaches’, in R. L. Jones & K. Kingston (eds.).
An introduction to sports coaching: Connecting theory to practice (2nd Ed.). NY:
Routledge, pp. 99-111.
Hedstrom, R. Gould, D. (2004). Research in Youth Sports: Critical Issues Status. Michigan:
Michigan State University

Jenkins, S. (2010). ‘Coaching philosophy’, in Lyle, J., & Cushion, C. (eds.). Sports coaching:
Professionalization and practice. NY: Churchill Livingstone, pp. 233-242.
Martens, R. (2012). Successful coaching. Champaign: Human Kinetics.
Stratton, R. (1999). Legal and Ethical Responsibilities of a Coach. [online] Ihsaa-
static.s3.amazonaws.com. Available at: https://ihsaa-
static.s3.amazonaws.com/RichEngelhorn.html [Accessed 19 May 2019].
Tuffey, S., Medbery, T., Gould, D. (2006). Kids Tell Us What Is Fun. Colorado Springs: USA
Swimming
Woods, B. (2000). Applying psychology to sport. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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