Coach assessment tool

Abstract

The Coach Assessment Tool was created to assist coaches of all sports for their own development. The starting point to develop the tool is the fact that coaching clinics solely focus on the technical and tactial skills of the sport. The education for coaches is lacking to teach the importance of the coach´s behavior towards their athletes. The question is how to teach properly the task in hand to increase the athlete´s performance considering the coach´s behavior. Nevertheless, coach´s knowledge about the proper behavior often is diametral to the athletes perception of it. Therefore, the tool was created to improve the self-awareness for coaches of their own coaching behavior and the impact this behavior has on their athletes. Furthermore it helps to identify coaching behavior strengths and areas to improve, as well as to help the coach improve his behavior through practical development methods. To evaluate the coach´s behavior, the tool insists of two main instruments for evaluation. The first instrument is the self-evaluation with questionnaires. The second part is the video analysing tool. Furthermore the tool includes a manual for coaches to analyse their strength and to improve their weaknesses based on the analysis results. The first step was to identify the factors of good coaching. There is no common scientific understanding for those factors. There had not been a concept of categories and subcategories that describes good coaching so far. The tool does not just enable the tools to identify the coach´s own behavior but also provides guidlines for the main categories of good coaching. The Coach Assessment Tool is designed for easy evaluation and analysis. It seems to be very useful for self-development for coach´s. Nevertheless, the tool has not been completely finalized yet, but the theoretical framework and steps to realize the Coach Assessment Tool for regular use is set.